


Second Intention

by fiorinda_chancellor



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: (not necessarily the same thing), A Study in Pink, Danger: Men Waltzing, Disney, Empath John, Empathy, Fairy Tales, Fantasy, Fluff, Folktales, Humor, Johnlock - Freeform, Johnlock Roulette, M/M, Magical Realism, Mind Palace, Science Fiction, Sherlock's Mind Palace, Sleeping Beauty - Freeform, Telepath!John, Telepathy, Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty, contains Sassy Disney Horse, contains putative Disney Prince, or maybe, or possibly blue (it keeps changing), the Crack Fairy made me do it, worse still
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-19 03:44:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1454188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiorinda_chancellor/pseuds/fiorinda_chancellor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson is a soulsurgeon damaged by war and by caring too much -- if there <i>is</i> such a thing. Sherlock Holmes is struggling with the effects of a curse that bids fair to end his days as the world’s only consulting detective unless a way is found to lift it.</p><p>...But Sherlock doesn’t believe in curses. Even assuming that he learns to believe in John... will that be enough to save him?</p><p><i>New!</i> Take a look at <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1454188/chapters/3314528#thewaltz">the beautiful final-scene fanart</a> from <a href="http://sweetlittlekitty.tumblr.com/post/86244516853/fiorinda-chancellor-sweetlittlekitty-do">Sweetlittlekitty: "John, do you dance? The waltz, specifically?"</a> ...Thank you <i>so much,</i> Kitty! (And thank you too, Mysterious Individual who commissioned it! You're wonderful!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“John! John Watson!”

The voice was strangely familiar. John paused, then turned and looked over his shoulder. A man was getting up from the park bench that he’d just passed.

Stocky bloke, dark-haired, glasses, and something familiar about the round eager face — “Stamford, Mike Stamford, we were at Bart’s together!” he was already saying, and John was kicking himself for having looked right at him in passing and not having instantly seen the younger, thinner man in the one now facing him. There had always been that glow about Mike, a good-natured warmth like fur or fluffed-out feathers; kind of an unusual under-affect in an environment that had all too often shown you people’s fear or anger or discontent before anything else.

“Yes, yes I know,” John said, taking the proffered hand and feeling the impact instantly: the irrepressible cheer, now being forcibly and uncharacteristically repressed because Mike had seen him limping, had seen the cane and the pinch of pain in his face. It made John feel like swearing, but that would hardly be polite to an old friend within seconds of meeting him. “How are you?”

“Heard you were abroad somewhere, getting shot at…” And now came the glance at the cane, because Mike was after all another carer, and did genuinely care. “What happened?”

John sighed, shrugged. “I got shot.”

Within moments, it seemed, they were sitting out in the untrustworthy autumn mildness, having coffee from the Criterion across the road and getting caught up on things in a vague and cautious sort of way. John made small talk about his sister and the cost of living in London while he worried idly at something he’d caught from Mike just before the handshake ended and John lost the more certain diagnosis of touch — something strange, a sense of exclamation points erupting off in the middle distance of Mike’s ground of being, a sense of interested conjecture. Unprofessional, of course, to go any deeper, any more than you’d pull out a stethoscope and start listening to someone’s heart without permission. “Who’d have me for a flatmate?” John muttered in slightly weary response to something Mike had said about finding someone to share with.

And suddenly there were all those exclamation marks again, popping up out of Mike’s fertile mental landscape like so many skeletons from sown dragon’s teeth—the impression strong enough to be propagated by mere propinquity, without even needing touch. “You’re the second person to say that to me today,” said Mike.

“Oh? Who was the first?”

Mike grinned. “The chap who fell asleep in our morgue just now.”

John’s eyebrows went up.

***

The bones of Bart’s hadn’t changed, but in a lot of places there was new flesh on them now: the labs had equipment far better than John remembered from his day, and the morgue shone, even the table with the dead body on it at the moment. In particular, one ornament to it that he would have enjoyed in his young day was the pretty, shy pathologist who greeted them as they came in. “Mike, is this— Oh.”

She knew, instantly: just as he did, instantly getting the sense of someone in the room who’d had the Sturm procedure but on whom it hadn’t taken. Mike had never bothered. “Too busy with teaching,” he’d said on the way over, “don’t need one more certification at this late date, have to do enough in-services for three men as it is—” But John instantly knew, or at least strongly suspected, the real reason, because it’d all been spelled out for him by his med-surg supervisor back at Camp Bastion. A teacher might feel he didn’t need the kind of complications that would arise from students who weren’t sure he wasn’t somehow creepily inside their heads, or worse, their souls. John, though, out in the field and desperate for more and better ways to keep his patients alive both pre- and post-op, had assessed the initial offering of the technique, found it chancy, even dangerous… and jumped straight in. _Too bad it barely started paying off before—_

He sighed as they shook hands. “Sorry,” he said to her, as much for what she knew she could sense going on inside him. “I get distracted. Molly, uh—?”

“Hooper,” she and Mike said simultaneously.

“Hi,” John said. “Pleased to meet you.” He glanced around, noticed that one of the shelves near the occupied mortuary table had a riding crop on it, and decided not to comment. “Mike says that somebody…”

“Fell asleep in here this morning? Yeah. He’s a—well, kind of a consultant, I’m not sure there’s really a name for what he does; he doesn’t work for the hospital. He uses our facilities sometimes for police work… has some kind of relationship with the Board of Governors.”

“Some upper-up in the NHS or someplace higher twisted the Chancellor’s arm on his behalf, is what I heard,” Mike said. “Anyway, he’s got the run of the lab facilities and the morgue.” He glanced at Molly. “Thought he might’ve been back by now.”

“No, he had to wait an extra half hour for the scan, they had an emergency come in.” Molly shrugged.

“And he just—fell asleep?” John said.

“Yes, and it was strange because if there was one word you’d _never_ associate with this man, it’s ‘narcoleptic,’” Mike said. “Kind of a rude-good-health type generally. And seriously you wouldn’t understand _why_ because you wouldn’t often see him eat, and as for sleep—” Mike shrugged in the helpless manner of someone who has a friend who won’t listen to advice. “But yeah, walked in here this morning the way he usually does—he uses pre-prep cadavers and the recently deceased for research, sounds a bit bizarre but seems to work—and then just dropped in his tracks.”

“I thought at first maybe he’d passed out from forgetting to eat,” Molly said. “It’s happened before, but usually he’s sitting down first…”

John looked at Mike in some bemusement. “And _this_ is the bloke who’s looking for a—”

Outside the morgue, down the corridor, one of the fire doors slammed open. “Yes, fine, thank you for your concern,” someone’s edgy baritone could suddenly be heard shouting, in a tone that didn’t sound in the slightest thankful to anyone, “now if you would kindly just _leave me alone—_ _”_

Mike smiled slightly. “Yup.”

“—as I need to retrieve my riding crop and get on with business. A man’s freedom is going to depend on it—”

The morgue doors burst open to either side as a man strode in: tall, lanky, arms spread wide with the push from a swirl of long charcoal coat, and under dark curly hair a long handsome face alive with pale eyes keen as knives and snapping with annoyance. As the doors flapped closed behind him that cutting regard flashed from Mike to Molly and then to John, those eyes pinning him with an angry intensity that caught John by surprise, and then surprised him again half a second later when some of the anger abruptly fell off. “So if we could kindly stop all this gawking and—”

And the man’s eyes rolled up in his head and he dropped to the floor like a puppet with cut strings.

Mike and Molly stared. Mike started forward but John was already limping over to the sprawled man, dropping his cane as he knelt beside him and turning him over just enough to check his carotid pulse. _Strong, but—_ “But” indeed, he knew just at the touch of a hand: there was something very interesting going on in there beyond mere systole and asystole.

Through the doors, hard on the man’s heels, came a white-coated female lab tech who stopped still at the sight. “Oh my God!”

“That scan,” John said, peeling back the man’s eyelid. _Responsive, good—_ “MRI or CT?”

“MRI.”

“How’d it look?”

“The neuro resident’s not in yet but the first read looks clean as a whistle,” said the nervous-sounding tech. “The bloods they drew first, though, _those_ came back just now and he really needs to do something about his blood sugar, he—”

“No problem,” John said, closing his eyes. He could feel the warm hum of brain activity, underrunning an inner murmur surprisingly energetic for someone who’d just passed out so very cold. “Maybe somebody can get him an orange juice? Won’t be a moment.”

And he went in.

***

Once over the threshold, for a second or so John stood very still, with closed eyes. As always there were issues of consent, never to be more carefully observed than when one’s patient had been unconscious on induction. But nothing moved to push him instantly out, so he opened his eyes and looked around the anteroom of the tall man’s soul.

Darkness, that was most of what he got at first glimpse: a broad twilit plain, not featureless, but studded with strange spotlit shapes a long way off, impossible to make out in detail from where he stood. The urge to examine them in more detail was strong, but for the moment John held still, did nothing, waited to see what information his senses would bring him.

The aromas were what got his attention first: a great complexity of them, yet each one perfectly identifiable to the man on the threshold of whose mind he stood. Two kinds of cologne, whatever Mike was wearing and whatever Molly had on. Lab chemicals, formalin, reagents, all intimately known in all their combinations and ramifications—so the background sense of complete familiarity and acceptance told John. Off in the deep background, mingled into an evening-like haze, was a medley of scents apparently all native to the man’s ground of being. There was a faint warm aroma of tobacco (with an annoyed fringe of should/shouldn’t hanging about it). There was fireplace smoke, and an assortment of chemistry-set stinks (some apparently accidental). There was an association of dark thick scents of decomposition with a peculiar experimental, recreational air to them, almost a sense of gaiety. And under everything ran the deep notes of leather, old comfortable carpeting, and a dry, brown, welcoming smell of books, all together somehow saying _Home_.

John shook his head. _Whoever this bloke is, whatever he does, he_ _’s got a fantastic sense of smell._ And as he took another breath, something different moved into the foreground—a strange mixture of black tea, fresh newsprint, warm wool, the alcoholic fake-citrus edge of hand sanitizer, the tart crunchy spice of the Granny Smith apple from breakfast. _Is that_ me? _He got all that from the second or so between him coming in and falling over?_ “That,” John murmured, “is amazing!”

All around John, and right through all that vast space straight out to the horizon, a profound and disbelieving silence fell. It held for a few seconds, as if someone was trying to absorb some unexpected and astonishing concept. Then behind him, a voice said, “Afghanistan or Iraq?”

Quickly John turned. There the man was, looming over him: pale, lean, elegantly jacketed under the coat, with a twilight-blue scarf doubled over and wrapped around that surprisingly long throat.

“Sorry?” John said. Not that he wasn’t, and indeed the apology was the next thing this man had coming, but considering that the first thing John normally got asked in such circumstances was a variation on _What the hell are you doing in here?!,_ he thought he could be excused for being thrown a little off his stride.

“Afghanistan or Iraq,” the man said, “which was it?”

John blinked. “Afghanistan. —Sorry, how did you—”

“And how’d you get in _here_?”

It was strange that the indignation surrounding the question didn’t seem to involve John’s presence on the man's psychostrate so much as the matter of as _where_ John was—which was surprising, as most people didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the structural configuration of their souls. “Well, I was worried about you. You _did_ just fall asleep in mid-sentence.”

The man scowled, then looked away from John and sighed an impatient sigh as if he was already supernally bored by what was going on. “One thing at a time, doctor. How do you feel about the violin?”

 _Doctor?_ “Sorry, _what?”_

“I play the violin when I’m thinking,” the man said. “Sometimes I don’t talk for days on end. Would that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other…”

John’s mouth dropped open. He closed it. “Wait. -- Did Mike tell you about me?” Except that there wouldn’t have been time. Mike had never been out of John’s sight since they met a little while earlier, wouldn’t have had even enough time to send a text… “Never mind, he couldn’t have. So who said anything about a flatmate?”

The man rolled his eyes at the inanity of the question. “I did. I told Mike this morning that I must be a difficult man to find a flatmate for. Now here he is back again with someone, plainly an old friend or he wouldn’t have been so quick about it, clearly just back from military service in Afghanistan… Not a difficult leap.”

John stood quite still as the man swept away from him, looking over the landscape that surrounded them with a peculiarly nonpossessive gaze: as if his ownership of it was beyond any possible question—which was almost exactly the opposite of most human beings’ response to finding that they not only _had_ a mindscape but that it was vulnerable to intrusion. For just a second John shut his eyes again and checked the under-affect of the place where he stood for any sense that this man had ever been Sturmed—looking particularly for the multisensory sandalwood-sunrise-sandpaper-bellstrike-blood orange tag that was always inserted into the cocktail of trigger drugs.

There was… something. A scent, a sound, wound together, very faint and distant, hidden deep. But it wasn’t a Sturm tag, and wasn’t native to this man.

John shook his head, looked up into that long sharp face as the man swung around toward him again. “How did you know about Afghanistan?”

“Got my eye on a nice little place in central London,” the man said, ignoring John's question completely. “Together we ought to be able to afford it. We’ll meet there tomorrow evening at seven o’clock.” He started to move past John into the dimness. “Sorry, got to dash—”

“Is that it?” John said in slightly annoyed disbelief.

“Is that what?” the man said, turning in a swirl of coat and pausing.

“We don’t know a thing about each other,” said John. “I don’t know where we’re meeting. I don’t even know your name!”

There was a strange sort of reserve in the man’s face as he looked at John then, and an odd stirring of something out in the shadows that John had trouble identifying: not just the man’s own emotions, held at a distance, but something else, something hidden. “I know you’re an Army doctor and you’ve been invalided home from Afghanistan—” And with a wave of the man’s hand the air around them came alive with _how_ he knew: a huge image of John’s wrist, showing in detail the tan line there. Then his head, and the cut of his hair. The curve of his back, his stance, the shoulders thrown back—

 _So odd,_ John thought, his neck hairs prickling, _to see yourself as someone else sees you._ And somehow he knew from a sort of whispering around them in the dimness that this man could be much colder, much fiercer in telling him these things. But he wasn’t. _Why?_

“—And I know that your therapist, because as a returning war hero you obviously _do_ have a therapist, thinks your limp’s psychosomatic. Quite correctly, I’m afraid.” A slightly less florid arm-wave accompanied this, almost as if the man regretted pointing it out: John’s unconscious ease when he stood, and an inferred image, misty and half-transparent, of how it would most likely look when John moved, based on the cane, the way he was holding it, the relative development of shoulder and leg muscles, the very slight list to the left even when he was still—

John shuffled a bit where he stood, a touch embarrassed. “There are other conjectures that will have to await confirmation until I see your phone, but that's enough to be going on with, don’t you think?” the man said, bending that cool silvery-green gaze on John again.

“Probably it would be if you weren’t asleep on the floor of the morgue,” John said. _“Again,_ apparently. And it looks like your scan was clean. Any ideas about why this might be happening?”

The tall dark-haired man rolled his eyes in annoyance. “A few theories,” he said. “…Well, two. Or one at least.” But he didn’t seem at all inclined to elaborate.

“Not too sure about that one, are you?”

The man sighed in exasperation, but after a moment he let the expression go. “The name’s Sherlock Holmes,” he said, “and the address is two two one B Baker Street.” He winked at John, actually _winked._ Then he spun himself around in a dramatic whirl of coat, and off he went into the dimness of the surrounding plain. He and the coat melted away into that spotlight-broken twilight as if it meant nothing to leave someone you’d only met three minutes ago walking around unattended on the ground floor of your soul. _Fearless,_ John thought. _Even reckless. Wonder if he thinks I_ _’m a hallucination? Or does this just seem like some kind of mental exercise to him?_ That happened sometimes… though it was an odd concept when you considered how astonishingly in touch with physical reality this man seemed to be.

***

John opened his eyes again, blinked at the brightness of the morgue illumination, and stood up with some difficulty. “All right,” he said, “that wasn’t the strangest conversation I’ve ever had, but it’s in the running.”

“He’s all right?” Molly said, her face twisted with anxiety.

“He’s fine,” John said.

“Why do you think this is happening?” said Mike.

“Well.” John looked down at the apparently peacefully sleeping form on the floor. “Don’t think anything more’s going to be forthcoming till we get him awake.” He glanced around. “He’s in here a lot, you say?”

“Oh yes,” Molly said. “Two or three times a week sometimes.”

“And he’s never done anything like this before?”

“Not before today.”

“Huh,” John said. “Well, it’s just a hunch, but—” He got his legs under him, turned Sherlock over on his back, slipped his hands under the man’s armpits, and began crouch-walking backwards and pulling him toward the door. It was work: Sherlock was more solidly built than he looked at first glance, all lean muscle under that coat.

He stayed unconscious right until he was completely out of the room, his heels clearing the doorway and the doors swinging closed as John finished getting him out. A moment later Sherlock’s eyes flicked open, and he lay there for a second blinking in the glare from the ceiling fixtures as John got up.

A second or so later he’d leapt to his feet again and was peering down at John with interest. “That was unusual,” he said, and held out his hand.

John took it, shook it. “Mr. Holmes,” he said.

"Sherlock, please,” the other man said. “Thank you, Doctor--”

"Watson. John Watson." It was absolutely the strangest not-quite-introduction John had ever been party to. A second later the doors pushed open and Molly and Mike came out. “So what was that all about then?” Mike said.

“Well, all things taken together,” John said, “and I’ll grant you that this hypothesis wants testing—” He turned back to Sherlock. “But I think somebody’s cursed you so that you can’t be in the same room with dead bodies.” 

Sherlock’s face twisted into an expression of lofty scorn. “Ridiculous! Curses are a myth. In the meantime, I need my riding crop—” He spotted it through the window of one of the morgue doors and pushed back in through them. They swung closed behind him—

John stood there thinking that it _was_ really true that a human body hitting the floor sounded like someone dropping a heavy bolt of silk...


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which at their first crime scene together, Sherlock borrows significantly more than just John's phone.

As it happened the arrival of the orange juice and Sherlock’s return to consciousness occurred more or less at the same time, and John was just barely able to get the juice down the man in the first few confused moments after he came around. But no sooner had he done that than Sherlock was scrambling to his feet shouting something about “The ladder, if the brother has a green ladder he’s got to be arrested!” And he whirled and fumbled in his coat and came out with a phone at which he stared accusingly. “Damn it, why can I never get a signal down here, when’s the bloody hospital going to install a repeater?” Sherlock demanded of the universe in general—

And then he was out the door and gone.

John got up with difficulty, looking from Molly to Mike in bemusement.

“Yeah,” Mike said, “he’s always like that…”

***

So John left and got on the Tube, picking up a sandwich and a mineral water at the Prêt A Manger in Canary Wharf while changing trains, and made his way back to his bedsit. Then while he ate his sandwich he did what one normally does when presented with the possibility of a new flatmate: he Googled the man to see what kind of social-networking presence he might have.

And John found a lot more than mere social networking. He found an abstruse and idiosyncratic and (in its forums, anyway) sometimes very cranky website full of densely reasoned yet intricate dissertations on various forensic aspects of crime, as well as a broad spectrum of hilariously creative insults and character assassinations—or rather, dissections—being applied in the post comments to those who couldn’t keep up with Sherlock’s deductions on this or that criminal investigation. A picture began forming of a complex sort of man—bold, magnetic, impatient, encyclopedically informed and trenchantly opinionated, plainly brilliant in a new and peculiar way: who knew, possibly a genius of some kind. The sort of person who could eat up your life if you let them. _Definitely the kind of person who could easily attract enemies, people eager to take him down a peg. And if he_ _’s actually been active in solving murder cases, someone who’s probably got at least some people who’d like to see him disgraced, or just plain suffering._

 _Or dead_ _…?_

John shook his head as he glanced away from the laptop, from the browser page full of the impassioned defenses and excoriations of the “Science of Deduction” forums. It could be quite problematic to get involved with somebody like this. Someone so arrogant, disruptive, opinionated… difficult. _Even dangerous,_ John thought.

But if this was such a bad idea, then why was his pulse up and his blood beginning to sing in a way it hadn’t done since the sun last beat down hot on him, since he was still in active practice, since before Bill Murray? And across the back of John’s mind there drifted like smoke the memory of that strange faint scent, that distant sound, both hidden away somewhere in Sherlock’s mind: the sensory signature of a cleverly concealed curse… something subtle and deadly.

John sat still in the dimness at the bare little desk, staring at nothing, and waited for his pulse and respiration to drop to normal levels. Then he turned back to the browser to open another tab, pulling up the bookmark for the Transport for London website so he could see which Tube line he wanted for Baker Street.

***

The next day at five minutes to seven John limped up and knocked at the black door of 221B, then turned a bit to wait: and as he did a cab rolled up and Sherlock stepped out, crossed straight to John, took his outstretched hand and shook it.

That immediate thrum of connection hit him as it had yesterday, like a plucked string, tuned and resonating. Therapeutic resonance was exactly what it was called, for good reason: always a requisite in getting any serious mindwork done, and curses were about as serious as it got. John was glad to feel that resonance, because if he was seriously going to move in with someone, any doctor/patient dynamic had to be tidied up early. “Mr. Holmes…”

“I did say Sherlock,” the other said, giving him a slightly odd look. It was one John had seen before, on new patients who hadn’t quite mastered the art of splicing a previous in-mindscape experience together with subsequent realscape ones.

“Sorry,” John said. “Of course you did.” He’d been playing it safe: people who hadn’t come to you specifically to get mindwork done did sometimes simply block such memories after the fact.

“And all that was real.”

“Late in the day to start defining reality,” John said. “But certainly it _happened._ _”_

“Well,” Sherlock said after a moment, “after all, here you are.” And then the door opened and a sweet-looking older woman all in violet was putting her arms around Sherlock and hugging him. “Mrs. Hudson, Doctor John Watson…”

“How do,” John said as he stepped in past her, inhaling an under-affect that featured scones and washing-up liquid and _Muguet de Bois_ overlaid on a rather countercultural herbal aroma that made him smile a bit. In they all went, up seventeen steps—hard on the bad leg, but somehow John was finding it difficult to mind. And there was the flat, charming and homey and warm even in its cluttered state. Immediately John recognised it: _his ground of being feels like this, some ways. Down in its lower reaches, the places I haven_ _’t seen—_ the place the warm brown book-smell had initially come from, the stink of accidents with chemicals and the friendly embrace of the leather chair. _Not quite home yet. But a place he_ _’s hoping eventually might be…_

“Looked you up on the internet last night,” John said, plopping himself down into the other chair. And when Sherlock said “Anything interesting?” and John said “Found your website”, the look of strange subdued pride and hope and even excitement that went across Sherlock’s face made John’s insides clench. _Loneliness,_ he thought. That mindscape had even at a cursory glance been eloquent—the broad widespread empty plain of it, with memorable experiences highlighted here and there across it… but so few, too far between, in the difficult life this man had made for himself, _was_ making, breath by breath.

 _But then everybody_ _’s lonely,_ John thought. I’m _lonely. Not that it counts for a hill of beans in this crazy world_ _…_

Mrs. Hudson came wandering in from the kitchen reading a paper and murmuring about three strangely similar suicides, and suddenly Sherlock was looking out the window and saying, “There’s been a fourth—” At that the resonance thrummed _hard_ , deep as a cello string with one end pegged into John’s chest. And at the back of his mind John tasted something plasticky and bitter that he had trouble identifying for a moment, until he remembered the adhesive on nicotine patches.

Moments later a tall craggy-featured silver-haired man was standing there urgently inviting Sherlock to the scene of an apparent suicide. He was barely gone before Sherlock was jumping for joy like a child who’d been given a specially nice present, and John found himself wondering why he wasn’t having second and third thoughts about moving in with this man. He hardly had time to draw breath before Sherlock was back in that coat and heading out the door. “John, have a cup of tea, make yourself at home, don’t wait up—!”

John was stunned. _Did I say reckless?_ he thought. _The man_ _’s cursed against dead bodies and what does he do but go straight off and—_

Mrs. Hudson was talking to him, but John was so distracted and concerned that he snapped at her instead of the brilliant lunatic he really wanted to snap at; then had to apologise, blaming his leg, all more or less on autopilot. Shortly she’d gone off to make tea, leaving John staring at the newspaper she’d left behind and thinking desperately, _He really is going to get himself killed if somebody doesn_ _’t—_

“You’re not just a doctor,” said a soft voice from the doorway, “you’re an Army doctor.”

John looked up from the paper where he’d been looking at the face of their visitor, a police detective inspector as it turned out. There was Sherlock, regarding him speculatively. “Any good?” he said.

John stood up, his burst of relief helping him restrain himself from the more acerbic possible answers to that question. _“Very_ good,” he said. “And at my specialty? Terrific.”

“Seen a lot of injuries, then… violent deaths.”

“Yes.”

“Bit of trouble, too, then.”

“In-mind and out,” John said, “yes. Enough for a lifetime. Far too much.”

Sherlock’s eyes gleamed. “Want to see some more?”

In the face of the chill pale eventless place his own mindscape had become since he’d come home, only one answer was possible. “Oh God, yes!” John said.

And with his words Sherlock’s whole under-affect went up in a blaze of glad fierce fire as he whirled and they headed down the stairs together. The heat of it washed over John as warm as if a shadowy sun had come up right in front of him; and if sheer excitement or delight or determination could have been enough to burn a curse away, John was sure that would’ve done the trick.

 _It_ _’s not, of course,_ he thought, as Sherlock swept out to the kerb and hailed a cab. _But afterwards, if he makes it_ _… if_ I _make it_ _… it’s really going to be something._

***

In the cab, of course, there were other matters to sort out. Fortunately the traffic was doing what it usually did this time of day, and a run to Brixton would give them enough time to deal with the details. “You know,” John said, thinking he might as well start the ball rolling, “you didn’t need to go running off, yesterday. I was getting a signal down there. If you’d stayed a moment longer, I’d have lent you my phone.”

Sherlock looked at him with, not exactly surprise, but interest that continued to deepen. “Yes,” he said, “I see you would have.”

“How?”

“If you’ll lend it to me now,” Sherlock said, “I’ll show you.”

John dug around in his pocket, pulled it out, and handed it to him. Sherlock turned the phone over in his hands, glanced at its side, glanced at its back, and then proceeded to tell John about his alcoholic sibling’s broken marriage, said sibling’s rocky relationship with John, and his own physical condition and other reduced circumstances. It was astonishing—if also embittering—and John found himself understanding why other people tended to lash out at someone who saw them with such merciless clarity and was likely to say what he saw as bluntly as Sherlock had been saying things yesterday.

For the moment, though, John simply sat there with his mouth hanging open. Then he shook his head and said, “That… that’s extraordinary. Simply extraordinary.”

Again Sherlock positively radiated that almost abashed sense of absolute amazement that no one was mocking him, no one was denigrating what he did. Finally, _“That’s_ how I see,” Sherlock said. “And now will you show me something?”

“Uh, what?”

“How you did what _you_ did yesterday.”

“Well,” John said, “this isn’t exactly an emergency situation, now, so—”

Sherlock’s eyes narrowed, a look suggestive of a man who’s seen through an impressive conjuring trick to its fraudulent mechanics. “Ah,” he said, “you’re about to tell me that you can’t necessarily duplicate the effect. That conditions aren’t correct, for some conveniently specious reason. Perhaps the stars aren’t in the right configuration.” He produced a delicate sneer.

“I was about to say that I need more explicit consent,” John said, just a touch annoyed, “but maybe before we go there you should bring me up to speed on what you actually _know_ about how I’m doing what I do.” At least from what he knew about Sherlock this wasn’t going to be the _usual_ conversation he wound up having with people, in which the next sentence he normally heard was something like _Oh, I know all about it, I read that article in the_ Daily Mail _last week,_ or _but it_ _’s really just more of this New Age crap, isn’t it?_ “What have you heard about the Sturm procedure?”

“That it’s a cocktail of drugs administered to provoke a subject-specific, intolerable stress reaction in the mind, one so severe that to escape it the subject’s mind is forced to make direct telempathic contact with the mindspace of someone who’s already gone through the process, blah, blah, blah…”

It was almost word for word from the, what was it, 2007?— press release from when the NHS initially approved the Sturm procedure for the treatment of some dissociative disorders: the news story that triggered the really big media firestorm about how the procedure worked and what it meant. _At least he_ _’s not quoting the_ Mail…

“The media seem to have been remarkably ambivalent about it. Especially since the prospect of the development of any technique that allows one human mind direct access to another’s would necessarily produce a certain amount of concern, or should we say panic, in higher government circles…” Sherlock held up his smartphone and John found himself looking at the front page of an all-too-familiar redtop tabloid, which screamed in palm-high block letters, LABOUR SAYS BRAIN RAPE OK!

John sighed. _Spoke too soon_ _…_

“And it was discovered by _accident,_ _”_ Sherlock said with utmost disdain as he put his phone away. “And no one’s even terribly sure about the details of how the treatment affects the brain—”

John had to briefly turn toward the window to hide his grin. “Oh, _I_ get it,” he said. “The serendipity aspect offends you. _You_ hate that they stumbled across the initial induction method while they were looking for something else, instead of in a nice tidy series of result-targeted studies.”

“If you’re suggesting I dislike mere senseless _blind luck,_ then yes, I do.”

John laughed. “Guess what, Sherlock? It happens. That _Penicillium_ mould floating in through Fleming’s window onto the Petri dish, _that_ annoys you, does it? When it’s saved millions of lives since?” Sherlock made a sour face, looked away through the cab window. “Well, you’re right, we don’t fully understand all the aspects of the induction mechanism, or why that particular alteration of human brain chemistry is the gateway. Or _a_ gateway: might be more we haven’t found yet. But this one works. There’s a whole raft of drug-brain interactions where we know perfectly well _what_ they do even when we don’t know quite _how_ they do it yet. Like _aspirin._ So what’s the problem with this?”

John had already suspected he wasn’t going to get an answer to that, having seen from the forums on Sherlock’s website that the concept _I was wrong_ was mainly notable for its absence. “And then there’s the ridiculous terminology,” Sherlock muttered, “reeking of superstition and fairy tales. Essentially antiscientific. ‘Maledictions’ and ‘spells’, the stench of the supernatural—”

“Right, as endorsed by the General Medical Council and the WHO and even the ISO. Those well-known proponents of pixie dust and unverifiable results.” John rolled his eyes. “Of _course_ sometimes we use old terminologies when speaking casually, because they’re in the culture—”

 _“Popular_ culture,” Sherlock growled, and there was such a weight of loathing loaded onto the word “popular” that it was a wonder it didn’t snap the cab’s rear axle.

“Yes. And because they’re handy shorthand when talking to patients. The people who coined those terms way back when were struggling toward some kind of understanding of what was going on in the mind. Memory of that runs deep. You prefer I use the modern jargon? Fine. I think someone with the training and personal information necessary to pull off a nonconsensual sublimbic exploit got at your _profundus_ , your interior landscape, and sabotaged it—”

That bought him a flash of interest, quickly covered over by scorn again. “Saying someone laid a curse on me makes nearly as much sense.”

“Look out there, you nearly proved my point,” John said. Sherlock scowled. “Look, I don’t care much for the tabloid terminology myself, but that’s just what they did. In old terms, it’s not a curse but a _geas:_ a behavioral binding with a narrowly defined trigger and a precise effect. Which is lucky for _you_ , because if the maledictor didn’t care enough to be specific and just hit you with a broadbased self-destruction directive, your body’d probably just have walked itself out into traffic, or dumped you off Waterloo Bridge in front of a Tube train.” John gave Sherlock a narrow look. “Or sent you off to some dodgy dealer to buy yourself a heroin overdose.”

He saw, and was briefly satisfied by, a brief flash of surprised horror in Sherlock’s eyes, immediately concealed under a hastily-applied veneer of unconcern. “Interesting, how did you—”

“I'm a professional. There are signs,” John said. “Never mind right now. But fortunately for you, whoever did this _really hates_ you.”

_“Fortunately?”_

“Because they went to the trouble of specifically enjoining you to become useless at something that’s vital to your work. They don’t want you dead, apparently. They want you alive, suffering, and out of the one job in the world you feel you’re suited for. As if for you they think that’s a fate worse than death.”

The suddenly shuttered look on Sherlock’s face made John suspect that Sherlock’s enemy’s judgment was right on the money.

“To confirm this I’m going to have to go in again,” John said, “which is why I need you to—”

But Sherlock had dropped his head into his hands and was pushing his palms against his eyes. “No, no, this is a disaster,” he was moaning. “How am I ever going to sort out who has motive for this, _everyone_ has motive, everyone I’ve ever shown the Met how to put away, even some of the bystanders would have motive—”

“Sherlock,” John said.

“—we’ll need to reexamine all the evidence, all the crime scenes, this could take _weeks—_ _”_ He bent over nearly double and began scrubbing his hands through his hair in utter enraged frustration.

John couldn’t help it: he just started laughing.

Sherlock’s gaze snapped up, furious. “What’s so funny, doctor?”

 _When you do that it leaves you looking like an angry poodle, that's what. But maybe best not to mention that._ “We don’t have to _re_ examine anything,” John said. “Not anything physical. And certainly not crime scenes, plural. Because you _are_ a crime scene. Don’t you get it? Whoever did this will have left clues to who they are and why they did it _inside you._ _”_

Sherlock slowly straightened; and to John’s surprise, his eyes began to glint with something like pleasure. “Indeed.”

“Yes,” John said as the cab pulled into a little crescent of run-down terraced houses where police cars were parked in a little constellation of blinking lights, fencing a space around with incident tape, “but no time to deal with that right now...”

***

They got out, paid off the cabbie. “Oh, one thing,” John added. “Harry is short for Harriet.”

Sherlock stopped short for several seconds. “A _sister!_ _”_ he hissed. “There’s always something!” And this minor detail put him into so foul a mood that he was extremely crass and cruel with the rude young police officer who let them into the scene, and the equally rude forensics expert who let them in to where the silver-haired DI from the flat and the paper, Lestrade, waited for them. His reaction to John’s presence was more quizzical than hostile, which was something of a relief and also said much about his opinion of Sherlock’s usefulness and expertise. John got suited up in the usual forensic-scene Tyveks and limped upstairs after him. As his new flatmate strode past him on the topmost landing, John said, “Sherlock, you might want to be a little—”

“Yes, of course, Doctor,” Sherlock said, and swept straight through the open door that Lestrade indicated to them. A moment later the dead body was the least of their worries. Far more of an issue (for John at least) was, sure enough, the sound like a bolt of heavy silk being dropped on the bare wood floor.

John sighed. “Yep, there he goes. Sorry about that, Detective Inspector…”

Completely befuddled, Lestrade stared down at the form sprawled (though somehow gracefully) on the floor, face-up and very softly snoring. “Yeah,” he said, “I heard about this yesterday from Molly Hooper when we were dropping a body at Bart’s. What do you make of it?”

“Got a couple of theories,” John said. “It’s looking like a curse, though.” With some difficulty he got down by Sherlock, peeled up an eyelid again.

Lestrade laughed a short barking laugh of frustrated amusement. “Hardly a surprise: this is _Sherlock Holmes._ People spend all day cursing him!” He rolled his eyes and added under his breath, “Do it myself.”

“Not like _this,_ _”_ John said. “Would you give me a second?” He checked the carotid pulse, found it strong.

“Sure. Think you can wake him up, though? God help me, I need him on this one.”

“Don’t think there’ll be a problem with that, but if timing’s an issue…”

Lestrade sighed, turned away toward the door. “Two minutes, tops. I need him conscious, and quick.” He raised his voice. “Anderson, keep everybody out for a few…”

John closed his eyes, targeted on the strong warm pulse, and went in.

***

Sherlock was standing in the midst of that broad twilight plain again, gazing around him with an aloof cool expression that John immediately read as confusion despite Sherlock’s attempt to keep that from showing. “Sherlock, I _did_ try to warn you…” John said.

Sherlock turned hurriedly and stared at him. “Ah,” he said. “And here _you_ are.”

“Thought we’d been over this ground. I’m a psychosurgeon,” John said. And then, with a shade of bitterness, qualified the statement, because imprecision at this level could find ways to snap back and hurt you later. _“Was_ a psychosurgeon. This is what we do.”

“Yes, climb into people’s brains and go mucking about.”

All that vasty dimness rustled with a sense of offended dignity. It was almost funny, under the circumstances. “Sorry, I don’t ‘muck’,” John said. “Unless ‘mucking’ includes helping you out while you’re lying snoring on the bare floor of some ancient squat while your DI’s at the end of his tether.”

“I do not _snore,_ _”_ Sherlock said, going all lofty.

All John could do in response was roll his eyes and produce a passable two-second imitation of the noise.

Sherlock froze. “At least when you fell over, you missed the corpse,” John said. _“…Just.”_

“Well, what are you waiting for! Do…” Sherlock waved his hands around. “Whatever you did the last time. Wake me up!”

“Won’t work quite the same way,” John said. “Sherlock, these things have a cumulative component: regardless of individual details, they’re a shock to the system. Every time the curse hits you, it’ll take longer for you to wake up. Be five minutes or so before I can bring you around this time. Could be ten. And Lestrade’s in a rush—his upper-ups are breathing down his neck, I think.”

“Why wouldn’t they be? They hate me making them look stupid,” Sherlock said, turning away and clenching one fist in his hair.

“Can’t imagine why,” John said. _But you have to wonder, if he_ _’s right, does someone in the force have something to do with this…?_

“This is ridiculous, how am I supposed to do the Work—!”

There was no missing the capital letter. But the echo in the back of John’s own mind to past and present sentiment of his own was immediate. _How am I supposed to work ever again, what if something triggers me and I have an episode while I_ _’m working on someone’s mind, how can I—_ He licked his lips, swallowed: the pain was considerable, and he couldn’t tell which was worse, his or Sherlock’s.

John pushed it aside. “We’ll get to that. But first things first, since _this_ is what I was trying to discuss with you in the cab before you got all sniffy about terminology. I need an explicit answer to this question. Do I have your permission to be in your soulspace and do work here?”

Sherlock glowered. “Superstition again. I don’t believe in the existence of the soul, much less that _I_ have one. The concept certainly can’t be empirically proven, people have been trying _that_ useless exercise for thousands of years—”

 _Yeah, this was due to come up too._ John threw his hands in the air. “Fine! Don’t call it a soul then. I know the vernacular term has metaphysical connotations, but for the work we’re discussing, those don’t matter. Are you at least willing to posit a nonphysical manifestation of a cognitive region where thought and emotion and your personal symbolisms mesh? I really hope so, because _here you are._ _”_

Sherlock actually glared around him for a second as if his own internal landscape annoyed him for having the temerity to prove John’s point. Then he sighed. “Once you eliminate the impossible…”

 _“This_ seems impossible?” John said. “I’d have said what _you_ did in the cab a while ago was impossible.”

“Yes, but _my_ methodology is rational,” Sherlock said, his face twisting in disdain. “Whereas _yours—_ _”_

“Has been peer-reviewed enough for anyone who’s bothered to do the reading, _including_ the _Lancet_ ,” John said, “but I’m guessing you usually only read the bits of that that could theoretically involve dead bodies!” And for the moment John didn’t mind letting his annoyance show, because he was just about up to here with this infuriating posh git who he was _trying to help._ “But you claim to be a scientist? Well, if you dismiss the _evidence_ in front of you just because it’s a kind you’re not sure how to analyze, then as scientists go you’re pretty piss-poor.”

Sherlock’s eyes went wide, and the look of outrage that he turned on John now was what you might see from someone you’d slapped in the face. John wasn’t even slightly bothered: anger was the single commonest reaction you ran into when in-mind with someone you were working with, and if it escalated, he knew what to do. “There is no need to be offensive,” Sherlock said, his back and his voice and his whole affect going very stiff.

“If that’s how I need to get your attention, yes there is,” John said. “Sorry if I’m more interested in breaking your curse than massaging your tender ego.”

_“Tender?!”_

“Sherlock!” John said. “Would you like to get back to work soon? To _the_ Work?”

“John, of course, it’s just that—”

“Then stop faffing around and give me consent!”

Sherlock looked stunned again, and all the space around them vibrated with astonishment. John’s heart turned over inside him with anguish he was at pains to conceal, but fortunately he was good at that: any psychosurgeon had to be. _Who_ _’s done this to you, who’s treated you so that even being_ asked _comes as a shock—_

“What? John, don’t be more of an idiot than you must, of _course_ you have my consent, I just—”

“You just want to stand here and argue some more,” John said, suddenly amused. Because yes, there was no questioning the quality of the consent now, total, unconcerned: along with the oddly unquestioning trust—what he’d felt before, like being thrown the housekeys of someone’s soul. Yet there was still a poignancy about it all. _He just wants to talk, to be listened to. To be approved of. Oh, God,_ Sherlock.

“It’s not about arguing. It’s just, how am I supposed to function on a crime scene when I’m not even in possession of my _senses?_ _”_

Now that consent was in place, at least one answer to the question was obvious. “Well, here,” John said, “use mine.”

Sherlock stopped still. “Your what?”

“My senses,” John said. He was a bit surprised at himself again, because since when did a doctor make such offers to his patients? Especially when they’d hardly known each other more than a few hours? But he wanted to help this man, he truly did. Because he was interesting, indeed far beyond interesting: the most fascinating thing John had come across in the long gray time since he’d come back to London and found himself out of a job, out of his life.

Then he realised that Sherlock’s eyes were glinting with sudden excited interest. “You mean use your body?”

“I’m ignoring how that sounds,” John said rather dryly.

“How what sounds? Never mind. I can move around, see through your eyes, touch with your hands?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Perfect!” Sherlock said. “Hurry, let me!”

“Hang on a tick.”

***

John opened his eyes and looked up at Lestrade. “He all right?” the DI said.

“Yes, fine. Just leave him here for a moment: he’ll channel through me so you won’t have wasted the effort of bringing him in. That be all right?”

“As long as he’s doing what he does,” Lestrade said, “I don’t care who does the talking for him. Just hurry.”

***

In Sherlock’s mindspace, air that had been uniformly shadowy was now full of a blizzard of words, some less visible or near transparent, some fading into visibility and out of it again as Sherlock pointed at them or hastily waved them away. He had his smartphone out, or rather an image of it, and was typing into it one-handed. “Ah, John,” he said, not looking up. “How do we do this?”

“You just talk to me,” John said. “I can hear you fine while I’m out there, while you’re holding onto this—” He reached into the pocket of his jeans, pulled out a long brass-cased bullet, held it out. “Just tell me what you need looked at.”

Sherlock took the bullet, looked at it curiously, then met John’s eyes again, wearing an expression that for him looked strangely somber. “There was an actual wound, then.”

“Yes,” John said. “My shoulder. This was what did it.” He shrugged. “Well, a reconstruction, anyway.”

Sherlock’s eyes had gone a bit wide. “It served someone else’s purpose once,” John said. “Now it serves mine. Ready?”

A surprisingly quiet, subdued nod as their eyes met again. “Yes.”

***

John opened his eyes, stood up, looked around the bare little room. As usual when someone else was partially in sync with him, his body felt a little odd. “So what do you need?”

 _“This first.”_ And he thumped John down by the body.

“Oi, mind the leg!”

 _“Sorry—”_ John blinked, seeing double: letters forming in the air, _this_ air, over the dead woman’s broken-nailed hand. _“RACHE (n) German: revenge. Ridiculous.” The words fragmented, vanished. “Rache-?” M_ ore letters ticked down through the air, possibilities being eliminated. _“’Rachel’. Better. John, just feel the back of her coat. Wet? Dry?”_

“Bit damp—”

_“Good. Pockets—”_

There was a pocket umbrella in one. _“Not pink, can’t think how she missed that, look at the rest of her! Dry, though, and closed tight, good. Enough of that. Under the collar, John. Dry. Yes. In my righthand pocket there’s a magnifier, you’ll need that—”_

John boosted himself up, the leg complaining: went and got it. _“The left hand, John, the jewelry, I want a close look at that.”_ John knelt again, snapped the slick little thing open. _“The rings. Yes, those scratches, absolutely. Get the wedding ring off._ Yes! _So diagnostic. You follow?_ _”_

“Follow what?”

_“Oh, John, you see but you don’t observe. How do you people bear it in your normal little minds? Must be so boring. Never mind, serial adulterer, ten years plus, let’s move on—”_

“Where?” John said, getting up.

“Got anything?” said Lestrade from the door.

 _“Nothing much,”_ Sherlock said, but the smug self-satisfied way he said it gave the words the lie—as did the sense of growing excitement inside him, shivering all through the air of his mindspace. _“John, quick, my phone, it’s in my left-hand pocket.”_

“She’s German,” said a voice from the door, and John looked up from beside Sherlock as he was extracting the phone. There was the forensics gent from downstairs who’d been rude to Sherlock. _“Rache,_ it means revenge, it could be—”

 _“No she’s not German, oh for God’s sake get Anderson out of here, he’s lowering the IQ of the whole street,”_ and before John knew quite what had happened, he’d walked over to the door and slammed it in the man’s face.

Then he stopped, his mouth hanging open while Lestrade looked at him quizzically. John stared back at the body sprawled on the floor. “Sherlock!”

_“The phone, John, focus please. Get the browser up, UK weather, maps, wind speeds, precipitation radar, thank you very much, Cardiff it is—”_

John took a moment to try to digest the rapid-fire narration that was going on one mind over. “Sorry, I’m so sorry about that. He says, um, that she—”

_“John, forget that for the moment, just have a look at the body, I need an informed opinion. Cause of death—”_

“He wants me to have a look at the body first,” John said to Lestrade.

Lestrade rolled his eyes. “Go on, do as he says… Just _hurry_.” He went out.

John put the phone away and knelt down carefully by the body of the woman in pink. “Sherlock,” he said, “seriously—”

 _“You can’t honestly be concerned about being rude to_ Anderson _, John, there are planaria with superior intellectual capacity. ...Some kind of CoD please, take your time but quite quickly—_ _”_

John sighed, leaned in close and checked the woman’s nail beds as best he could, looked and smelled for traces of vomitus. “Asphyxiation,” he said finally. “Passed out, choked on her own vomit. Can’t smell alcohol on her.” Lestrade came back in at that point, and John got up. “Could have been a seizure, drug overdose…”

 _“You know what it was. You’ve read the papers,”_ Sherlock said, a touch annoyed. _“Never mind, he’s pressed, give him this—”_

“He says she’s a professional person in her late thirties,” John said to Lestrade, “maybe something in the media… traveled from Cardiff today, intending to stay for a night, going by the size of her suitcase.”

“Suitcase?” Lestrade said.

“Yes. She’s been married at least ten years, but not happily, she’s had a string of lovers but none of them knew she was married—”

“That’s brilliant!” John said before he could stop himself: but then he’d seen the raw material of the reasoning.

_“Do you know you do that out loud? No, it’s all right, don’t stop on my account—”_

“Oh, come on,” Lestrade said, “if you’re making this up—”

“See,” John said, starting to struggle with the speed of the internal narration, “it’s to do with the rings. All her other jewelry’s been cleaned except for the wedding ring, and—” The words and fragments of words were jittering in his vision again. “The only place it’s clean and smooth is on the inside, the only time it gets cleaned is by her pulling it off, so who does it get pulled off for—”

“But _Cardiff?_ _”_

“It’s to do with her coat, it’s had time to dry out somewhat. But it’s still damp so it’s only been a few hours. Then there’s her collar— Sherlock, will you slow down?” But the words he was trying to repeat sped up more and more, and the leaps of reasoning were getting past John’s ability to understand now, and Sherlock was getting more and more impatient. _“—come on John, pick up the pace, hurry_ up!”

John scowled. “Well, if you think _you_ can do it any faster—”

“Now that you come to mention it—”

“Fine!”

And quite suddenly John found himself saying, “Her coat: it’s slightly damp. She’s been in heavy rain in the last few hours. No rain anywhere in London in that time.” His voice had acquired an impatient edge, Sherlock’s frustration showing through. “Under her coat collar’s damp, too. She’s turned it up against the wind. She’s got an umbrella in her left-hand pocket but it’s dry and unused: not just wind, _strong_ wind – too strong to use her umbrella.” The words were coming quicker now, and the storm of other words, other data ancillary to the reasoning but not actually needed, was swirling around John like snow through a window someone had left open in a blizzard. “We know from her suitcase that she was intending to stay overnight, so she must have come a decent distance but she can’t have travelled more than two or three hours because her coat still hasn’t dried. So, where has there been heavy rain and strong wind within the radius of that travel time?” And he showed Lestrade the smartphone and the webpage Sherlock had had him bring up. “Cardiff.”

Lestrade gaped as John stood there blinking again with the stress of bridging between two minds. _Or one mind like mine and one mind like_ his—! “All right, enough of that, just shut up a second!” John said.

Externally, silence fell… but not internally. After a moment John added, “He’s ranting about the suitcase again. Won’t seem to stop. Where is it?”

Lestrade just shook his head. “Come on, let’s get him out of here. Forensics need the room now.”

It was a bit easier to move Sherlock this time with Lestrade handling the legs while John took care of the thinking end. The noise inside _his_ head, though, from the other mindscape he was connected to, was considerable and irate. John sighed. “He should come out of it fairly quickly once he’s out of the room proper,” he said. “That seems to be how this curse has itself set up. No more than five or ten minutes, I’m hoping…”

Together they deposited Sherlock on the landing, and John stood over him while the forensics team filed in, giving him assorted angry or hostile or simply confused looks as they went in. _“The suitcase!”_ Sherlock was shouting. _“John, we have to be sure!”_

“There _wasn_ _’t_ one, Sherlock,” John said, trying to hang onto his patience, and looking to Lestrade for confirmation. “Suitcase?”

“Not in the house,” Lestrade said.

_“That’s it then, that’s it—”_

“—They take the pills themselves, they chew, _swallow_ them themselves, there are clear signs, even _you_ lot can’t miss them!” And then John put his hand over his mouth. “Sorry, sorry, when he’s really stirred up…”

Lestrade shook his head, finding it possible to be amused at what was going on. “Thanks. _And?_ _”_

 _“Murder!”_ said the sleeping Sherlock, and John repeated for him. “All of them. He doesn’t know how. But they’re not suicides, they’re killings. Serial killings.” And a cold shiver ran up John’s back. “You’ve got yourselves a serial killer.”

 _“I love those, there’s always something to look forward to,”_ Sherlock added: a sentiment John chose not to pass on… which provoked a dark chuckle from inside. _“Squeamish, John?”_

 _“Inappropriate,_ Sherlock.” He sighed. “But maybe she went to a hotel?”

_“A woman like that, everything color-coordinated down to her lipstick and her shoes, she never made it to a hotel, do you think she’d go out with her hair looking like—”_

A sudden silence fell, astonishing due to its completeness. John stood stock still, afraid something had happened to their connection or that Sherlock had somehow triggered something disastrous associated with the curse. But no. All Sherlock’s mindscape was suddenly painted over with the word OH, about a thousand times. And something else was going on: the stuporous state was starting to shift. _He_ _’s coming out of it, thank God.  
_

“Someone else was here.” ( _“Where’s the case? Did she_ eat _it?_ _”_ Sherlock was saying, but this too John declined to pass on.) “Someone drove her here,” John said for Sherlock, “someone who forgot they had the case—” His heart was starting to hammer with Sherlock’s excitement. “Serial killers, always hard, you have to wait for them to make a mistake…”

“Sherlock, we can’t just _wait!_ _”_ Lestrade said to John, his face twitching a little with the weirdness of it.

“We don’t have to wait, we’re _done_ waiting!” Sherlock shouted, leaping up with such suddenness that even John, who’d felt the episode starting to fade, was startled. “Look at her, really look!” And he was already flying down the stairs. “Houston, we _have_ a mistake! Get onto Cardiff, find out who Jennifer Wilson’s family and friends were, find Rachel!”

“Sherlock!” Lestrade shouted. _“What mistake?”_

A final shout floated up: _“Pink!!”_

John was left standing and looking at Lestrade in a mixture of embarrassment and confusion. Lestrade was looking back with at least as much confusion, so John didn’t feel quite so wrongfooted. “Y’know,” Lestrade said after a moment, “this was a lot more pleasant when he was asleep on the floor and _you_ were doing the talking.”

John just shook his head and smiled a bit as Lestrade excused himself and went after his team. Then he went after Sherlock.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which curses and their breaking are discussed, and John discovers two castles and a palace without walls.

John hobbled back down the stairs and got out of the Tyveks, then limped on outside through a cloud of unrestrained under-affects: the usual assortment of people annoyed to be standing around bored while others did interesting things, overlaid with the sharper and more engaged thought/feeling complexes of those busy with work and annoyed with the expected or unexpected details of it—like John. As he stood there briefly at a loss in the dark, wondering where the hell Sherlock had got to again, suddenly he was overlapped by the angry under-affect of the young woman who'd earlier addressed Sherlock as "Freak", as if that was a commonplace for her and something she rather enjoyed.

That memory alone was enough to make John bristle, and to make him turn their brief conversation into an exercise in rigid self-control. While others he worked with were still getting used to the idea that he'd gone off and got himself Sturmed, John had spent day after day being assaulted by colleagues' thought-processes all suddenly festooned with distrust and fear. And _Freak!_ was something he'd had to put up with too, even among people who definitely should've known better. _But Sherlock's not doing anything but be intelligent. Well,_ abrasively _intelligent. Still, he's_ helping _them, he doesn't have to be doing that, this behaviour from them isn't_ warranted— John limped away from the woman's infuriating insinuations and baseless predictions in an increasingly foul mood: so foul that it took him a while to notice that ringing phones had been following him all the way from Lauriston Gardens right up into the high street in Brixton.

And when John picked up the last ringing phone and heard the cool smooth voice ever-so-covertly threatening him, when the cameras turned off their little red eyes and ostentatiously looked away from John, when the sleek dark car pulled up beside him... it was somehow just the last straw. As he sat beside the pretty young woman whose glossy and well-armoured attention in the middle of a kidnapping was nevertheless almost wholly on her Blackberry, John actually had to pull away into the dry warm plains-country of his own casual upper-level mindscape and push the anger down under the surface where it wouldn't interfere with business. He was so annoyed he couldn't even flirt up to his usual standard.

Shortly thereafter he found himself being decanted into a huge, chilly middle-of-nowhere warehouse in front of a tall, chilly, unreadable man. Well, not _entirely_ unreadable. The closer John got to the bloke with the brolly, the easier it was to read the sandalwood-sunrise-sandpaper-bellstrike-blood orange signature hanging sharp in the air—the Sturm tags with the UK's unique ISO-8000 fish-and-chips qualifier attached, all strong and unmistakable. In fact they were so strong that it was as if the man wanted to shout, loudly enough to be heard even by the nonaugmented, _I have it, I can see right through you, do not trifle with me._ Mostly people would have perceived this only as a vague foreboding creepiness, their hair standing on end, a sense of quiet impending threat. But John was no clueless member of the general public, and knew exactly what he was sensing.

"Have a seat, John," the man said, pointing at a lone black plastic-seated stacking chair in front of him.

John was in no mood for sitting down, especially when it would almost certainly mean being loomed over yet again. "You know, I've got a phone," he said as he limped up to the man and tried not to be too obvious about peering around to see who else might be in here with them. "And—it's very clever and all that, but you could just phone me. On m'phone..."

"When one is avoiding the attention of Sherlock Holmes, one learns to be discreet: hence this place," the man said, gesturing about him with the furled umbrella. "Your leg must be hurting you. Sit down."

"I don't want to sit down," John said. It _was_ hurting him, but if he needed to do something sudden, physically or mentally, the hard sharp edge that the pain would add to his response could be useful.

"You don't seem very afraid," said the man.

"You don't seem very frightening," said John. _But then neither do I, which I guess is why this conversation is continuing while you're this close to me._

John had laid the thought out straightforwardly in the neutral "buffer" mindspace that automatically sprang up between any two individuals who'd been Sturmed when they were within overlap range. But there wasn't a flicker of response from the other except to laugh and peer down his nose at John while delivering a frankly offensive line about soldiery, bravery and stupidity. Assuming that the man had heard John's thought—a safe assumption—the lack of response could mean that the rudeness simply went down an extra layer, or that he was concerned that even neutral-zone engagement would give away something he preferred to keep hidden. _Fine_ , John thought, again making the ideation available, _we'll keep it verbal then, shall we? Sorry I made you nervous._

No response to the gibe, either. "What is your connection to Sherlock Holmes?"

"I, well, I barely know him," John said. "I met him yesterday."

"Mmm," the other said. "Yesterday you moved in with him, and now you're solving crimes together. Might we expect a happy announcement by the end of the week?"

 _Oh, this is ridiculous._ "Who are you?"

"An interested party."

"Interested in Sherlock—why? I'm guessing you're not a friend."

"You've met him. How many friends do you imagine he has?"

It was a fair point, but only when considering people who had no gift for looking more deeply into a person than the semi-illusory surface described by openly displayed behaviours. John was far more interested in what lay beneath the surface, as he suspected _this_ man at least ought to suspect.

"I'm the closest thing to a friend that Sherlock Holmes is capable of having," the tall man said.

"And what's that?"

"An enemy."

 _Oh really._ Because the issue of who might have planted that curse in Sherlock, and why, was very much on John's mind. _What if this man—_ But the chap in front of him had as tightly guarded a mental economy as John had ever sensed from the outside: not even a whisper of leakage from him. The urge to get a little closer to him and his mindscape and see just how tight those inner safeguards _were_ was considerable. _Just to see if I can catch a whiff of whatever it is I smelled in Sherlock's mind that wasn't native to his own processes... We'd find out pretty quick whether you're worth being frightened of._ But for the moment John held still. "An enemy!"

"In his mind, certainly. If you were to ask him, he'd probably say 'his arch-enemy.' He does love to be dramatic."

"Well thank God you're above all that," John said, as his phone's text alert chimed.

 _Baker Street,_ said the text. _Come at once if convenient. SH_

"I hope I'm not distracting you," said the man.

 _When what I really want is to get the fuck back to something passing for civilisation so I can go_ check _on that bloody man and ask him why he buggered off in such a rush and left me in the least sanitary possible end of Brixton? While also making sure he's not about to run straight off to the company of yet_ another _dead body and wind up snoring on some even_ more _unsanitary surface? Of_ course _not._ "Not distracting me at all."

"Do you plan to continue your association with Sherlock Holmes?"

"I could be wrong," John said, "but I think that's none of your business."

The man reached into his suit jacket's inside pocket, pulled out a little book and cracked it open, peering at something. "Trust issues," he said softly... and the hair stood up on the back of John's neck at the exact phrase that his therapist used to express one of her favourite themes. "Or so it says here. A deliciously ironic state of affairs, wouldn't you say, for someone who spends most of his own time paddling about in other people's souls?"

 _'Most of his time'?— If_ only, _any more!_

John scowled. "I do not _paddle_ ," he said softly. "Where I go, I go for the healing of men's minds, in accordance with my oaths. Which I don't propose to waste time justifying to random nosy strangers in deserted warehouses. Are we done?"

"You tell me. As should you fully commit to moving in with Sherlock Holmes, I'd be willing to pay you a meaningful amount of money to...ease your way."

John's eyes widened and all thoughts of handling the rest of this encounter delicately, let alone subtly, went out of his head. The hand that was curling itself into a fist was distracted just in time by the phone going off in his pocket again.

_If inconvenient, come anyway. SH_

John put the phone away, breathed deep. _He's all right. Just bloody manage yourself until this ill-mannered sonofabitch gets bored with this._ "No," he said to the tall man.

The other stepped closer. Increasingly profound annoyance already had John's senses reaching out for any wisp of leakage from the other's interior landscape, but all he got as the propinquity effect really kicked in was a general sense of a ground of being as chill and cool and clinical as any operating table, bright light ready to illuminate every corner, hard clear lenses poised to mercilessly magnify. _That's some control he's got,_ John thought. But the echoes of the cold made it hard not to shiver.

"I imagine people have already warned you to stay away from him, but I can see from your left hand that's not going to happen."

John swallowed, knowing instantly where this was going. _And now what? Do I allow this? Is this just to his advantage, or can I turn it to mine?_ "Sorry?" he said in the best possible imitation of someone who genuinely had no idea where this was going. _As where it's already gone is reason enough to punch him._

"Show me?" The tone suggested this was a question, but the man's manner made it plain it was anything but.

John clenched his jaw, held up his hand.

The man came close, reached out.

"Don't," John said, pulling his hand back a bit.

The man gave him a look that said _Who's holding the high hand here? Do as you're told—_

John merely looked at him. _Bastard. Show you? Yes, I think I bloody will._

—and reached out to take his hand, turned it over—

At his touch, _through_ it, John instantly went on the offensive. He gripped the man's mind too hard and deep to be quickly dislodged, threw himself backwards into his mindscape, and pulled both of them under its surface into what the man's rudeness had earned him—

The battlefield. The mortars and the small arms fire, the smoke and the screaming, and the shot that had come out of nowhere while John was deep in his poor corpsman's mind trying to save his life. And suddenly life was the whole issue—his own, though: he could _not_ die inside someone else's head because that was clean contrary to his oaths and seriously not good, you'd kill the other person too. He just managed to extricate himself only to fall back into his own agony, from which he'd been dangerously distanced while he was in Dave Murray's mind. And now here he was, too shocky even to scream and bleeding out in Afghan sunlight that should have been unbearably hot but now seemed wintry-cold as his own landscape shivered and wavered and darkened around him like an increasingly immaterial thing—

—and later, when he woke up in the first of a long succession of cold white hospital beds, _then_ would come the bitter realization that his own interior world would never again be as solid as it had been, his own interventions in other minds never again as sure, his deftness and certainty as a practitioner of the arts of the mind forever shattered now by the terror and the phantom pain that might strike him and overwhelm him again at any time, without warning. The tremor in his dominant hand was merely the physical symbol for the inner, mental damage, the terrible new reality: his practice of physical surgery _and_ psychosurgery, both effectively over. The only things that mattered, gone for good. _There._ That _. Me. Broken. Everything I'd trained for, destroyed. Was_ that _what you wanted to see, you chilly fuck? Fine. Put_ that _in your fridge and freeze it!_

—And then the man simply brushed John's reality off him like some minor annoyance, like dust off his clothes. There they both were again, in the warehouse. The man, apparently not even slightly moved by immersion in John's fury, let go of his hand. "Remarkable," he said, and turned away.

John licked his lips, swallowed, mastered himself. "What is?"

"The battlefield," the man said. And then, turning back to John again, dismissive: "Oh, not _that_ one. The other one. When you walk with Sherlock Holmes, you see _his_ battlefield. You've seen it already, all littered with dead bodies. _Lived_ a bit of it with him, in fact. Rather an unusual level of intimacy to offer someone you've known for all of a day." The man's eyes were dwelling on him with an expression that could almost have seemed wryly humorous, if there was anything particularly funny about having a conversation like this in an empty warehouse with your kidnapper. "Odd that you're so very trusting, so very quickly."

"No, I'm not. I'm—" John paused, keeping his face still. _I like him, I like the feel of his mind, and I want him to be all right,_ was the thing he absolutely was _not_ going to say to this man, whoever he was: possibly even the person who'd put that curse in place, for all John knew. In any case, somebody whose relationship with Sherlock seemed ambivalent, to say the least.

"You're what?"

John swallowed. "Finished here," he said, and turned his back on the man, starting to limp back toward the car.

"By the by," said the man behind him, "your therapist, the one who thinks the tremor in your left hand is anything to do with post-traumatic stress disorder? Stupid woman; you really ought to fire her."

John stopped still, the hair rising on the back of his neck; then turned to face the man again. _What I let you see just now, that was_ nothing _to do with her, what the hell were you looking at, how did you get any further in without me even_ feeling _it—_

The man was standing there looking haughtily amused. "And certainly incompetent, not to instantly recognise a man looking for another war to take up the slack." He smiled, and it was a smile that didn't reassure John in the slightest. "No matter, Doctor Watson: I'd say you've found an adequate replacement. Always assuming you choose the correct side... and watch your step in the dark."

He turned and wandered off, idly twirling his umbrella: and John's pocket chimed one more time. Other footsteps were coming up behind John now, but for the moment he ignored them as he pulled out his phone again.

_Could be dangerous. SH_

"I'm to take you home," said probably-not-really-Anthea, hardly even looking up from the Blackberry.

"Two two one B Baker Street," John said. "But I need to make a stop first."

***

  


When John walked into the flat's sitting room he found Sherlock lying sprawled out on that comfy-looking couch with an expression of vague, relieved pleasure that—bearing in mind the background noise John had noted inside Sherlock's mind—stopped him right in his tracks. When Sherlock showed him the nicotine patches, John breathed out with a level of relief that surprised him, despite lingering concerns about ill-managed habituation and overdosing. "Well?" he said after a moment. "I'm assuming it was important—"

"Oh! Yes. I need you to send a text."

John's next ten minutes or so were filled with a rapid succession of events, objects and emotions: annoyance, exasperation, a phone number on a scrap of paper, more annoyance, concern, a pink suitcase, _serious_ concern, texting a murderer, significant trepidation regarding the likely results of texting a murderer, being called an idiot, serious annoyance abruptly overlaid with surprise and then (repeatedly) with growing, astonished appreciation—

John found himself nearly reeling when the pace of things slowed down a little bit, while he sat recovering from the idea that he had just been instrumental in an attempt to contact a serial killer. He had actually had to distance himself from Sherlock's under-affect somewhat, for his new flatmate's reactions to the events transpiring were completely different from what might normally be expected from a sane and rational person. Yet the same under-affect, for all its inappropriate exuberance, had about it such a foundation of rigorous rationality that John had trouble really being alarmed. _And isn't that a little odd too?_ he found himself thinking. _Why am I so calm about this? None of this should be at all calming. Yet he's—_

"You're thinking," Sherlock said, "that I'm operating quite effectively for someone who's 'under a curse.'" The quotes were audible.

John gave him a look. "Not so sure of that, Sherlock. Just sure it's a good thing you have a professional around to keep you from damaging that brain any further."

 _"Damaging—"_ The sense of sudden alarm that flooded Sherlock's mindspace overspilled it and seemed to run right out to the walls of the flat."Further, what do you mean _further?!"_

 _Mmm hmm, thought so_. If there was something else plastered all over Sherlock's ground of being, it was absolute confidence in the peerlessness of his brain, and his ability to absolutely control the various ways he abused it... _that he understood._ John was aware that he now had a narrow window of opportunity to sneak some vital data under the man's hyperacute mental radar—

"Not that it isn't ridiculous, the very idea that anyone can just wander into your brain and muck about with it—"

 _A_ very _narrow window._ "Not just anyone," John said. "The first time, I got in because I needed to, I knew how, and you couldn't have stopped me. _Now_ I can get in because you allow me to. But the person who did this to you _didn't_ just wander in out of nowhere. They had to know something about you that gave them entry: something in your past history, or some... let's not call it a weakness. Just a point of access, a back door into your interior landscape that they were able to exploit without raising any alarms."

"Yet you knew immediately."

"Because I'm trained," John said. "I know how to look for the signs of this kind of attack just as a medical doctor knows how to recognize the signs of internal injury. _Treating_ this, though..." John let out a breath. "It's more complicated. I need to take another look around, get the lay of the land... ideally when there's no corpse in the neighbourhood, or people standing around gawking. I need time to go deeper."

Sherlock sat quiet for a moment, then nodded. "How long will this take?"

John shrugged. "How fast is the speed of thought?"

Sherlock's eyebrows went up. "Best get started, then." He glanced over at John's phone where it sat on the little table beside the left-hand chair.

"Uh, all right," John said. "So... a contact point, then? A pulse point's good—it gives me something extra to focus on."

Sherlock nodded, held out his hand, the inside of the wrist turned upward.

"Lean back," John said. "Might as well close your eyes too. Ready?"

A slight nod.

John rested his index and middle fingers over the radial pulse, curled his thumb around the wrist to brace, closed his eyes too. "Right."

***

And there they stood in the darkling plain with its far-spaced, spotlighted structures, Sherlock in his coat and scarf again, John standing by his side. "Care to talk me through it?" John said, looking around. "Where are we?"

"Just a holding area," Sherlock said, glancing around: "projects in abeyance, cold cases... I leave them here where I'll see them on the way in, maybe have an idea about one of them."

John nodded. "A vestibular space. Lots of people have these."

"Lots of people have mind palaces?" Sherlock said, sounding somehow indignant at the very idea.

"Mind _scapes_ , of course they have them," John said. "Palaces? You'll have to show me."

"Well," Sherlock said, "it's not a palace the way Buckingham Palace is a palace, you understand. More of a... Look here."

He reached out, and with the motion they were standing in the downstairs space just inside the door of 221B, a cool bluish illumination from the fanlight spilling down onto them. Sherlock opened the door, stepped out: John followed him.

The effect was exactly like using a normal door, and left them standing on the pavement outside Baker Street, under the streetlights, as dusk settled in around them. From off southeastward Big Ben had just finished its mellow hourly recitation of the full Westminster chime and was starting to strike eight.

"When I said I wanted a look around," John said, "I was hoping for someplace that had a bit more of a view. So I could get a sense of how you have things structured and organised in here..."

"Let's find some higher ground, then."

And an eyeblink later John staggered in astonishment to find himself standing beside Sherlock on what might have been a mountaintop, for all he knew: but he didn't feel inclined to spare it so much as a glance. He could barely even breathe, seeing what he saw. Away down below them lay a landscape of hundreds of thousands of buildings, a city of the imagination that reached all the way out to the distant uncertainty-hazed horizon. Every square mile of it was strewn with structures of every possible kind and size: mighty libraries, cavernous high-arched railway stations and skyscraping office buildings, monuments and mausoleums, museums and storehouses and streets that ran neverendingly with light, streams of taillights like blood and headlights like white-hot rivers. Everything John could see was symbology made solid, data and imagery and information all compressed and made manageable, but still impossibly multifarious and detailed. John was sure, just from the feel of the spatial fabric of the place, that anything he saw would unfurl in multiple dimensions at the touch of its master's intent. It was a mindscape of a sheer complexity the like of which John had never seen before, and he'd been in many mental landscapes, both sparse and sprawling.

And held safe inside all this broad-skied darkness, nestled at its heart, lay London. Not a map of it, but a perfect duplicate, obsessively and lovingly complete in its every street and alley, glittering in its own heat, shiveringly alive and beating like a heart. _I'm reliably informed that I don't have one,_ said an echo from somewhere or other in Sherlock's voice, a remembered answer to some old taunt. But John saw this and knew otherwise. _He'll never be lost in London,_ he thought in awe: _how can he be? It's_ here.

"Sherlock, this is... this is _unbelievable_ ," John said softly, turning to take in the full view.

Sherlock smiled. "I must find you a thesaurus," he said. "Wouldn't want you to run out of synonyms."

John just sniffed a laugh down his nose and kept turning. _Though this really is remarkable..._ Out beyond the low-roofed swaths of suburb, though, past the Eppings and Edgwares of Sherlock's mindspace, things got a bit strange. _Here be peculiar architectures,_ the edges of his interior map ought to have read. The buildings went jagged and asymmetrical, and the surrounding landscape went vertiginous and craggy—not so much alpine as spiny, as if there'd been an outbreak of dolomites around the fringes of Sherlock's mindscape: a guardian circle of stone razor-wire, a crown of thorns.

John stood very still. The complexity of the place as Sherlock perceived it might seem daunting at first, but John had scented the alien influence buried here on his very first time inside, and he'd find it again. He closed his eyes, breathed, felt around for anything that didn't seem like Sherlock.

"John?"

"Ssh," John said, and slowly turned in place, blind. _Something...Not something immediately visible, though. Not to me, anyway._ It had been a sound, before. He was having trouble detecting that right now. But the scent...

 _Yes. There._ And not just one scent, but a couple. A strange combination. Faint and acrid, the topmost one: chlorine. _Like swimming pool water._ But something else too, even fainter. An odd sort of sweetish-almond aroma: it reminded him of something his mother used to put on biscuits when he was little. _What was that stuff? She'd roll it out for Christmas cakes, too. Wait. Marzipan, that was it._

He opened his eyes, squinted toward the horizon. _Yes. That way._ "Sherlock," he said. "What's that little pale thing? There's sort of a light patch, and then something sticks up. Hard to see in this light."

Sherlock put an arm out, beckoned at what John pointed at.

The landscape leapt toward them, the suddenness of it making John stagger again with the illusion of motion. An eyeblink later what had been many miles away was lying practically at the feet of whatever invisible promontory they stood on. Surrounded by a wide sward of green was a castle of the now-archetypal "fairy tale" type made famous by a great entertainment empire—all neo-international Gothic with tall pointed duncecap towers and sheer walls and even a drawbridge and a moat. It was positioned ever so scenically under a post-sunset sky, all pink and lavender at the edges, surrounded by post-Deco parkland and hilariously stylized trees.

"There," John said. "That's where the curse is hidden."

"But hidden in plain sight," Sherlock said, sounding anticipatory and amused.

John nodded. "It's in there somewhere. A puzzle, and its solution."

"Oh." Sherlock looked around, scanning the horizon. "Not in _that_ one over there?"

John followed the stagy pointing gesture and immediately saw the other castle, half a ruin, silhouetted against a murky clouded sky gone leaden-livid at the edges. He'd felt it in the distance, but not seen it before. Now John went cold all over, wishing to God that Sherlock hadn't seen it either. "No," he said.

And suddenly the man was in his space— _fair enough, you're in his!_ —looming at him. _He's got a gift for that, really, it's more than just his height—_ "John," Sherlock said, staring down at him with eyes gone steely and fierce. "Don't try to fool me. It doesn't work. _What is that?"_

"Not trying to fool you," John said. _Redirecting for all I'm worth, yes. But since it's not working—_ "That? It's a trap. Your enemy's left it for you, in case you got clever enough to suspect what was going on. Which is why you're interested in it, because it's _meant_ to be more interesting. That, over there, that is _not_ about breaking the curse and getting back to the Work. That is about the _opposite_ of breaking the curse. That's about putting yourself in danger again—"

Sherlock's eyes gleamed. _Oh fuck,_ John thought. Am _I the idiot he thinks? Apparently so._ "Putting yourself in a place where your enemy has the advantage. Sherlock, don't be daft—!"

"Chess, John!" Sherlock said, with relish. "Any move that's not an attack is a retreat!"

And he vanished.

John stared around him. "Sherlock?" John shouted. _"Sherlock!_ Dammit, sometimes retreat is _smart!"_

It always took a few moments to extricate oneself from a mindscape when its owner had absented himself from active cooperation. John struggled up through the darkness as his ears started ringing with intolerable buzzing jangling _noise_ , deafening after the shared quiet. And then it wasn't just his ears ringing but _real_ ringing, his phone ringing. John's eyes snapped open and his head turned just in time for him to see the screen of his phone, which had said CALLER ID WITHHELD, now go blank except for the words ONE MISSED CALL.The chair across from John was empty, and footsteps were pounding down the stairs. "Come on, John, he's panicked, the game is _on!"_

 _"Dammit,_ Sherlock!" John muttered, grabbed his cane, and hurried after.

***

  
That they should shortly thereafter fetch up in the front-window seats of a cozy little Italian restaurant, surveilling the address Sherlock had had John name in his text and being waited on by a burly bearded man who _wasn't_ a murderer and who thought John was Sherlock's date, somehow didn't even seem particularly strange tonight. _Which says entirely too much about this situation,_ John thought.

 _Except why do I not give a damn?_ The "date" comment had brought up the question of who else there might possibly be in Sherlock's life—a question which he'd verbally turned aside with far more skill than John had been able to muster to distract him from that dark peak-perched castle. But John could tell from the tentative quality Sherlock's under-affect acquired during the exchange that much more could be said on the subject. _What, though?_ John had quickly backed away from the question. _Not my business. Not now, maybe not ever._ Especially when there were much more important issues to resolve.

"Once things quiet down again," John said, finishing the last couple of scraps of his veal piccata, "we're going to need to finish up what we started." _If they ever_ do _quiet down again!_ said some part of John's mind, sounding entirely happy for this not to be the case any time soon.

"If it takes no more time than what we _did_ do," Sherlock said, his gaze not leaving the street outside, "I'm sure I'll be able to work you in later tonight."

John couldn't quite repress a small smile. _No one this smart can be that blind to innuendo!_ But aloud he merely said, "Might take a _bit_ longer. Finding a curse... once you know how to look, it's not too hard."

"But it's found, now. Surely an experienced professional like yourself won't have any trouble lifting it."

It wasn't mockery in Sherlock's dry tone. In fact there was a glint of appreciative humour in the affect under it, edged with the words _Any good?_ Very _good,_ and bright as a sword unsheathed for a moment before being slipped softly back into the scabbard.

John smiled. "A curse," he said, "is like a wound; it's a break in the mind's structural integrity. Through the wound, instructions from outside can be inserted to change or control behaviour—"

"Like viruses taking over a computer."

"Or tissue being infected by bacteria, yeah. To stop the curse from working you have to restore the mind's integrity, and the process is like wound healing, so that's the terminology we use. " John put his cutlery on his plate, pushed it away. "To lift a curse properly, you try to get the wound in the mindscape to heal by first intention; like when a wound heals properly, cleanly, from the bottom up. Just adding some outside energy to the interior economy by benediction can be enough sometimes."

Sherlock snorted. "Blessing it better?"

"Term's a bit simplistic," John said. "In this case, good intentions aren't just what you pave some road with." He shrugged. "In your case, though, I doubt it'll be that easy. Whoever went to all this trouble won't have intended to leave you with just the psychic equivalent of paper cuts."

Sherlock frowned. "The phraseology implies a second intention, then."

John nodded. "Less desirable. In a physical wound, that'd mean there was buried infection involved. You've got to get the contaminating matter out before you dare let it close. Lance the infection site or cut through whatever scar tissue's already formed, and drain it. Then it can heal properly: by second intention. Might still need packed or stitched up, but the edges'll pull together at last."

"And how on Earth does one 'lance' a curse?"

"By solving it from underneath. Analyzing its structure and using its inherent weakness to defuse it. Curses always have a loophole: they have to in order to work."

Sherlock blinked at that. "Why on earth would faulty structure be _required?"_

"Ever paint yourself into a corner, Sherlock?" John had to grin at the disdainful look that the question produced. "A curse without a back door, an exit point, leaves a fragment of the maledictor trapped inside the cursee's psyche. And leaves the maledictor with a reciprocal wound. Nobody does that willingly. Unless the person who cursed you is really stupid— in which case they've left a piece of them stuck in you and we'll be able to find out who they are right away—they'll have left a loophole. We find it, we break the curse through it: problem solved."

Sherlock sat quiet for a moment: then glanced up. "'We?'"

"Problem with that?" John said as casually as he could. _Because potentially it is a problem. This has to be done jointly, you don't have the expertise, just being clever won't be enough—_

"Not at all, John," Sherlock said, quite casually. "I'm sure your assistance will be of great value." John kept his face perfectly relaxed, no matter how much he wanted to roll his eyes at the smug git's gracious and self-sufficient tone. "Is there another level, a 'third intention?'"

John shook his head. "Not for in-mind trauma," he said. "Flesh can heal by third intention, but it leaves a hell of a scar. Lost tissue, a lot of ugly granulation. In the mind, third-intention damage never heals." John swallowed. "Not an option, Sherlock. First or second intention, or nothing."

He let out a breath. "And _no more corpses_ for you until we get this sorted, understand me? Because you can't break through this by will power or brute force. In fact whoever did this to you probably hopes you'll try that, because I'm guessing they'd love your rationality to be your undoing."

John felt Sherlock's under-affect go suddenly spiky and annoyed. _Because reason's been his only friend for a long time..._ "John," Sherlock said, "while I'm touched by your concern— "

John shook his head. _"No._ Every time you trigger the curse and fall asleep, the infrastructure of your mind suffers an insult—like the wound tearing wider. The damage will get worse with each episode, and it'll take you longer to regain consciousness every time. Keep on being stubborn about this, walk onto just one crime scene too many, and you'll fall asleep and _never wake up."_

Sherlock scowled at him and didn't have an immediate snappy comeback line. John took that as a positive sign for the moment.

"So," John said. "just in case we _do_ stumble across something we shouldn't, because dead bodies do seem to be kind of an occupational hazard for you—" He reached behind him for one of the things he'd needed from his old flat. "Here," he said, pulling it out of his back pocket, and held it out for Sherlock to take.

Sherlock reached out and took the little thing, staring at it: a small misshapen lump of lead. "This was your bullet," he said, glancing up again. "The real one."

"What's left of it," John said. "Keep it with you. If we're in-mindscape together working on the curse and someone tries to interfere with what we're doing, being in contact with that means you'll be able to find me that much faster." _Or I you..._

Sherlock was nodding absently, looking past John's shoulder as he put the bullet away in the inside pocket of that sharp dark jacket. After a moment he gestured at the street. "Look."

John half-turned. Across the street, under the streetlight, outside 22 Northumberland Street, a black cab sat idling. Inside it, shadowy motion.

"Don't stare," Sherlock whispered.

"You're staring."

"We can't both stare."

John understood the logic of this perfectly well. But he couldn't look away from the black, shining thing out there, because he could suddenly smell chlorine, and ground almonds, and could feel a shadow trying to press the sight out of his eyes. Out there in the cab was something to do with Sherlock's curse—

And Sherlock was in his coat, and out the door, before John could so much as open his mouth to warn him. "Sherlock? Sherlock, _wait—!"_

 _Damn it all!_ John thought, grabbed his coat and followed Sherlock.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which bottles of pills are set out on a table and dragons are fought...
> 
> Now including the [wonderful fanart for the final scene](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1454188/chapters/3314528#thewaltz) from [Sweetlittlekitty.](http://sweetlittlekitty.tumblr.com/post/86244516853/fiorinda-chancellor-sweetlittlekitty-do) Thank you again, Kitty! And you, Mysterious Person who commissioned it!)

They ran through the London night, ran like mad things. _Reckless,_ that was definitely the word that kept coming up for John as he raced through the twisting streets after Sherlock. With the prospect of his prey in front of him, the man was simply unstoppable. John kept catching glimpses of that relentless mind solving for his quarry’s path, judging, predicting, assessing, paths and trajectories—a word- and image-tagged cloud of probabilities that was never still, always changing. _If a computer had a mind,_ John thought, _and you could watch it from inside as it solved a problem, it might look like this._ But John very much doubted that it could ever _feel_ like this—singing with excitement the way John’s blood was singing, exulting in the chase; and not just that, but also in the one who chased with him. And it wasn’t just a question of the present contiguity of their mindspaces. _He knows,_ John thought as he paused, teetering, on the edge of one roof before the jump to the next one. _He knows how I, he knows that I—_

John shied away from crossing that particular brink just yet, concentrating on jumping the physical gap before him. The mental and emotional ones could wait for later. Right now they were on the hunt, and John gladly, eagerly let that necessity possess him. There was night and excitement and the rush of wind in their ears as they ran, there was an appointment with death and danger at the end of it, and the pounding of their feet on the pavements, in step, in time, _together—_

And then Sherlock leapt out into the street right in front of the cab, stopping it. John came up close behind him and threw the net of his undersenses over it as Sherlock crowded in close, opening the door to get a look at the passenger and flashing an ID he had no right to have.

John rolled his eyes, but for the moment was more concerned by something else. _What was I feeling back there?_ he thought. _How did I get it so wrong?_ Because at close range he could detect no hint of marzipan and no scent of chlorine—just an odd, subdued sense of distant sunshine (very much missed) and a neutral, beige-gray affect, desperately bored with everything and underlaid with a grubby, tattered, grayed-out ground of being that looked as if it was made entirely of pages from the _A2Z_.

 _Where’s what I felt?_ John thought. _Was there somebody else in this cab who got out?_ No way to tell. The trouble was that for all his and Sherlock’s mad dashing around the London landscape, the cab itself might have been traveling relatively slowly. Traffic lights, zebra crossings, the twists and turns of the inner London roadscape—

And Sherlock was already finished deducing the passenger and eliminating him as a suspect—plainly having found nothing worthy of notice about the cabbie—and was now turning away in a flash of (outer) fake-congenial smile and (inner) annoyance at having been wrong. “Welcome to London!” he said and spun away, leaving John staring into an open cab door at the tanned and faintly suspicious face of a confused Californian.

“Call us if you have any problems…” John said, shutting the door as soon as he could without seeming abrupt, and went hurriedly after Sherlock, caught between exasperation and amusement. The amusement won, not simply because Sherlock had so patently been showing off for him—and admittedly it had been a bravura display—but because he was now privately so put out that it hadn’t worked out as expected, and all the inside of his mindscape was jumping with annoyed top-row-of-keyboard swear-characters. All John could do was laugh at that. And then (seeing Sherlock’s uncertain response to the laughter), “‘Welcome to London,’” John said, still laughing; and the two of them took to their heels before the genuine police could come after them.

***

He meant to come clean to Sherlock about his own confusion, he really did: about the way he’d got it wrong about the cab and its contents when looking out the window at Angelo’s. As they trotted home, the uncertainty bubbled up in him, and he wanted to warn Sherlock, _Listen, I can’t really be sure about things any more, can’t be sure that my own preconceptions aren’t tainting my assessment and perception of mindscape. You’re getting a busted implement here, there’s a better than even chance that I’ll be getting things wrong—_

But he never got a chance. The exhilaration of the night, the chase, the man he ran with, all conspired to drive the urge temporarily out of him and left him leaning against the hallway wall and gasping with still more laughter at the ridiculousness of it all, and then Sherlock matter-of-factly told him that well, he’d invaded Afghanistan, and John lost it again. And then Angelo was standing at the door with John’s crutch, and John was left gaping and astonished with the absolute, well, _crutchiness_ of it; here he’d been leaning on this thing, literally leaning on it for all this while, and it turned out it wasn’t needed, maybe hadn’t been needed for who knew how long. And Sherlock just smiled a knowing smile—

 _What else haven’t I needed?_ flashed across John’s mind. _What else have I been assuming was broken? And what if that cab—_

But that was when Mrs. Hudson appeared, very distressed, and John found himself in the middle of a “drugs bust.”

The quotes here were not merely audible, but visible, to John at least. He had more leisure this time to get a feel of Detective Inspector Lestrade’s mindscape. The detective had brought a sense of weary alarm with him up into the flat the last time, but now John could feel that alarm much sharpened and overlaid with huge annoyance. A dark shadow of potential disappointment was also waiting in the wings, bound up with a strange heavy sense of concern. (Associated to this John perceived—all too clearly, because a lot of emphasis was being put on it at the moment—a tired harried man dragging something heavily ironic across an endless parking-lot-concrete landscape, with a sign nailed to it that said MY CROSS TO BEAR.) He and Sherlock were verbally sparring over both the Jennifer Wilson case and Jennifer Wilson’s case—which John belatedly realised Sherlock hadn’t informed the police that he _had:_ definitely an oversight, but things had been happening so fast.

And then they sped up further. Now Rachel was not just a name but a child stillborn long ago, and an urgent message scratched with great pains on a bare wood floor. Now Jennifer Wilson’s missing smartphone was not just some misplaced electronic device but an implement of justice, planted on purpose to lead the police to her killer. Now the tag on her luggage was more than a tag, it was a key, and Sherlock was unlocking her profile on the myphone.org.uk website…

It was all amazing, and terrifying, and John could hardly keep track of everything that was happening. The confusion and alarm erupting in the minds of all the people around him would have been enough to put anyone ever Sturmed off their game for at least a few moments. And John had been too long away now from the noisy mental chaos of field medicine and the operating theatre, and was out of practice at dealing with the stinging sleet of emotional input associated with crisis scenes. He was staring at the phone-location page on Sherlock’s netbook—which was bizarrely insisting that the pink phone, Jennifer Wilson’s phone, was _here_ —and also concentrating on filtering out the worst of the background emotion— _last thing I need right now is an extrasensory overload, not to mention the headache!_ —when he heard Sherlock’s phone chime.

Sherlock glanced at it and stood quite still. Then he slid it back into his pocket with an odd abstracted look, as if something else had his attention, as if he wasn’t seeing what the other people in the room saw…

“Sherlock, you okay?”

“What? Yeah, yeah, fine—”

“So how can the phone be here?”

“Don’t know.”

“I’ll try it again.”

“Good idea…”

“Where are you going?”

“Fresh air. Just popping outside for a moment. Won’t be long…”

So strangely flat, Sherlock’s voice, when every other time they’d spoken in their short time together it had always been so vibrant, so full of expression. _What the—_

But there was no time to pursue that line of thought, because all of a sudden everything was changing again. Lestrade was quarreling with one of his team, and the pink phone was ringing out when John dialed it, and the cab had left with Sherlock in it— _why are you running off without an explanation_ again _, you tit?_ —and then the police were gone too, and John was left in the flat alone, pacing, getting more and more worried about Sherlock and wondering what the hell to do next.

And in the silence, in the blessed mental emptiness that had fallen in the wake of the “drug bust’s” departure, something flashed across John’s vision. But not his vision, actually: someone else’s. A sudden image of enwrapping glass and shining darkness, the glint and flicker of streets and shops and cars sliding by unregarded outside: but inside, a torn photo clipped to a dashboard, the back of a head with a flat cap on it, narrowed eyes in a rear-view mirror. A welcome feeling of danger rising, of a mystery about to be solved—

Gone again. John blinked, shook his head, passed his hand over his eyes, confused, concerned… and, in his own mindspace this time, saw something else. The image was faint, all sensation associated with it weak, attenuated by distance. But it was still available for John to see and feel because the bullet that had been intended for his heart was now resting over someone else’s, and the image was unmistakeable. Thunderclouds gone greenish-livid above and flickering with uneasy lightning inside, over dark peaks and an ugly spiky castle of black stone. Through the heavy air came the far-off sound of angry thunder, and faintly, the scent of chlorine, the aroma of marzipan—

Now John’s eyes flew open at the thought of the way Sherlock had left the flat, walking slowly, his voice distracted, strange, like a man under a spell. _Shit. Shit! I’ve been too slow, why didn’t I_ see! _Sherlock,_ where _the fuck—_

And the little netbook pinged.

John strode over to it, snatched it up, stared at the map: then snapped the netbook closed and dashed down the stairs.

***

Now John knew what to do. _This_ he’d seen more than once before in his psychosurgical practice in the Army: a curse in its final stages of full execution, pushing toward the purpose for which it had been designed and built. Such things routinely carried with them a terrible sense of inevitability, part expression of intent, part protective coloration: no decent curse ever wanted to suggest that it was breakable. But the _problem with the dead bodies…_ that _wasn’t the main curse at all. That was just a marker, a way for the maledictor to make sure the curse was working. It was a signal, an alert. And now the person who laid this is getting ready to trigger the real curse, the fatal part, the part that Sherlock’ll never feel coming._

John smiled a smile grimmer than anything since Afghanistan. _But_ I _feel it. And I know how to find where the loophole is._

 _Now all I have to do is drag_ him _out through it, still breathing. So no pressure…_

The image of the castle was the key. John knew that movie well enough: he’d seen it too, on video when he was little, and later when it came out in the theatres. _Something in that movie is a back door into Sherlock’s mind. And also the source of the curse, the power that’s making it bite._ The problem was that it was the _unlikeliest_ source for a curse, in Sherlock’s case, that John could possibly have imagined. Sherlock’s mindscape in its work areas, or what he’d seen of them so far, was a study in sparseness: wide open spaces, bare, clear, the airs of his inner world positively astringent. _Fairy tales? Not his division, you’d think._

But there wasn’t time to argue the point. The evidence was clear. _And there’s not going to be time to go sniffing around for clues, either. Later for that… assuming the curse doesn’t burn all traces of its construction away when it self-destructs._ Because that did happen. Cunning maledictors often inserted such provisos into their work, and the victims often didn’t care one way or another about the fine details once the curse had been lifted.

What frightened John more than anything else right now was the curse’s likely physical component. There had to be one—otherwise why bother having the cabbie spirit him away? Simpler to just kill Sherlock dead in his own sitting room. _And you know what it’ll probably be. Some empty, abandoned place. A poison pill. And this clever, clever man who’s so bloody sure he can outthink anybody… but this time the game’s rigged against him and he doesn’t have a chance!_

In the back of the cab he’d finally managed to hail, John sat with the netbook in his lap, multitasking for all he was worth: giving the cabbie directions, trying to reach Lestrade, and doing his damndest to hang onto his composure. _This is no worse than work used to be sometimes,_ he thought. _Just don’t lose your nerve. Or the connection!_ Because now John had to get into Sherlock’s mindscape and start the real work for which he’d been given consent… the work that would give Sherlock at least a fighting chance of living through this.

 _Thank God the consent was so complete, that’s all. Jesus, he more or less tossed me the keys to his mind._ The trust was astonishing, and something down inside John wanted to question it, wanted to say _You hardly deserve that. What did he_ see _in you?_

But John’s mind went back the tall chilly man in the warehouse. _An unusual intimacy to offer someone you’ve known for all of a day,_ he’d said. And that was true too. Trust wasn’t easy for John these days. What had immediately been so different about Sherlock?

 _Everything,_ something immediately said in the back of his mind.

John licked his lips, unnerved. Well, never mind that now. He glanced at the map on the netbook again, watched the little pinging dot move. “Yeah,” he said to his own cabbie, “get onto the A23 up ahead, right? Thanks—”

He gave up on Lestrade and put his phone away. He closed his eyes and took a breath and cleared away his own concerns, letting the darkness behind his eyes go deeper, feeling around him for the connection, the vision other than his own.

And there, _there_ it was: the bright slide of shops and traffic, still ongoing, shoved to the back of an active mind while it was intent on gathering the data that would make the difference between life and death. All so very remote…

—except _not_ remote, because Sherlock was still with him, or rather John was with Sherlock by virtue of the misshapen pellet of lead resting over his heart, hidden by the coat and warmed by Sherlock’s skin. John had cursed that little slug of metal a thousand times—in nonpsychosurgical mode—but now he was blessing it as he’d rarely blessed anything in his life. The vital connection, oh God let it hold. _Keep_ _that damn coat on, Sherlock, because now the real work begins—_

Quietly, quietly he sank into Sherlock’s mind as if into deep water, submerging…

***

And there he was standing in that high place again, gazing out across it: but alone this time. John turned, looked out into the violet dusk. _That castle,_ John thought. _Let’s have a look._

When in another’s mindscape with full consent given, intent was deed. An eyeblink later John stood in front of the castle, just on the far side of its drawbridge, examining the edifice. It was bigger and far more detailed than the version he remembered from that long-ago visit to Disneyland Paris, and was splendidly hung with banners as if prepared for a celebration. But heavy cloud was looming over everything in the twilight, a hint of Sherlock’s reaction to the approaching danger.

And there was something else here that John hadn’t seen before, because Sherlock had been with him and the curse meant for Sherlock to be blind to its details... especially its infrastructure. The foundations of the castle and the pathway to its portcullis gate were shadowed by great half-seen thickets of tangled, thick-trunked thorn bushes, barring the way and making the place impenetrable even though they weren’t actually here yet. _The curse,_ John thought, _ready to activate._ He took a few steps forward onto the pathway to the gate and reached out a hand to push it through the translucent shadows.

The sheer sense of danger the filmy brush of the shadow-thorns brought him made John gasp. What was most unnerving about it, though, was the sensation’s power—and that was being fueled by Sherlock himself. _His love of mystery, of danger, they’re all tangled up with this._

 _Shit!_ John pulled his arm out of the shadowy insubstantial thorns, shook his head. He’d been hoping that this curse could heal by first intention. _Never happen, though. Whoever designed this curse_ knew _Sherlock’s weakness, designed this feature into it. Just pumping positive energy into it and trying to get rid of it by benediction would simply fuel the curse, make it stronger._ To save Sherlock the curse was going to have to be cut out by force, from within, and destroyed. In no other way could his mind be finally healed.

John breathed out raggedly. _Second intention or nothing,_ said his voice in memory. But second-intention healing was usually difficult, and as dangerous for the healer as for the patient. John ground his teeth for a moment in frustration and fear. _I do_ not _want to fuck up this magnificent mind,_ he thought. _It’s unique, irreplaceable. But looks like I’ve got no choice… this’ll have to be done from as deep inside as I can go._

He glanced around him. _Looks like we’re a few fairies short,_ John thought. But that was no surprise: even after knowing Sherlock for as short a time as he had, John found it difficult to believe that he’d have allowed wingety cartoon fairies in his mindscape. _Gonna have to do the heavy lifting myself. Still, it’d be smart to conform to the background story as closely as possible._

He knew what was needed next. _Because it’s Sherlock’s world, his curse, his symbology…_ Normally dressing up as a fourteenth-century cartoon prince wouldn’t have placed very high on John’s bucket list. But he didn’t dare take the chance of doing anything that could disturb this resonance. So…

In mindscape, intent became deed, and John’s cableknit jumper and jeans and brogues promptly exchanged themselves for a front-laced doublet and trunkhose and boots, as well as a short cloak and a hunter’s long beltknife and an unfortunate hat that said nothing so much as “Robin Hood”. John laughed once down his nose at what he must look like. _Bit early for panto season,_ he thought, shaking his head, _but needs must._

He turned and glanced back at the furious tangle of thorns-yet-to-come and the still, silent castle beyond them. “All right,” he said under his breath. “Need just one more thing to fit in, don’t I? A horse.” _Which’ll be interesting, since I can’t even ride..._

From behind him came a whinny.

John turned and found himself looking at a pale grey horse with a white blaze down its nose, maned and caparisoned in black, saddled and bridled: but even his childhood memories of the movie couldn’t have prepared him for its long elegant face, its odd, pale, tilted eyes, and the expression of dry amusement with which it was favouring him.

 _Oh great,_ John thought. _A typical sassy Disney horse._ He could all too clearly foresee being repeatedly dumped on his arse and horse-laughed at, just when he and Sherlock needed it least. _I’m truly fucked._

“Listen,” John said. “Got somebody in here who’ll need rescuing, but I need to make a stop first. You up for it?”

The horse rolled his eyes at John, then turned in place and carefully showed him the left side of the saddle, gesturing with his head at the stirrup.

“Right,” John said, put a foot in the stirrup and boosted himself up into the saddle, where he sat, he suspected, mostly like a sack of potatoes.

The horse craned its head around to favour John’s seat with a judging expression almost Sherlockian in its amused scorn. _No surprise: this is some other buried aspect of the way he interacts with the world, or this particular story, or both._

John rolled his eyes. “Yeah, fine, the family didn’t exactly have the dosh to send me to pony club, okay? So don’t drop me. We’ve got work to do.” He picked up the reins, tugged at them experimentally. “Look, see those mountains over there?”

Another roll of the eyes that said _Obviously I do, for God’s sake do get on with it._

“Good. That one all by itself in the middle, see the castle on top of it—?”

The horse snorted and took off.

John hung on as best he could as the landscape poured by and the deepening twilight closed in around them—

***

“Mate?” the cabbie was saying to him. “You asleep back there? How far down you want to go, mate?”

 _All the way,_ John thought, but that was the wrong answer. His eyes flew open and he stared at the netbook screen. The dot associated with the pink phone was still moving. _Nearly out of Brixton now, almost into Balham, where the hell is he headed, Tooting Bec for fuck’s sake?…_ “Stay on this for the time being,” John said. “Getting closer.”

“Right you are, just call out when you see where you want to turn—”

***

—In the darkness, in the mindscape, wind roared past them, while ahead of them the Forbidden Mountains reared up, dark-fanged, and overhead the thunder crashed. The horse under John galloped like the wind, snorting with pleasure at its speed, occasionally throwing an assessing glance at him over its shoulder. To his surprise John was having little trouble staying on: seemingly as little as Prince What's-his-face had had.

That was just as well, because John was concentrating on listening to the wind, seeing what the mindscape would tell him through it. Fragments of speech kept drifting to him, real-life voices mingling with dialogue from the film.

_“Sherlock Holmes! I was warned about you.”_

_“I’m sorry, child, but you must never see that young man again.”_

_“Been on your website. Brilliant stuff!”_

_“Oh, I’ll never forgive myself!”_

They were slowing a bit. John looked around him alertly as his steed angled around one mountain spire, their goal temporarily lost behind it.

_“Who would notice me?”_

_“You poor simple fools!”_

_“That’s all you’re going to know. In this lifetime…”_

_“Touch the spindle. Touch it, I say—!”_

The hair rose on the back of John’s neck as he heard what he was sure was a crisis phrase. The tone was commanding, and he could feel the stretch of time behind it, and the power in the words, sunk in deep in Sherlock’s psychostrate.

 _Definitely a trigger,_ John thought. But by itself, knowing the trigger wasn’t enough. _I need the rationale, the gunpowder inside the bullet that the trigger fires._ Touching something was somehow going to be important.

His steed was slowing out of the gallop now, into a canter, finally just walking as black cliffsides closed in around them. One more turn around a sheer cliff and there the dark castle was, rearing high above them. It was dour and ruinous and foreboding, and there was no mistaking the miasma of hatred and evil that hung about the place. John shivered at the sight of it, thinking of Sherlock. _Might have been his once, in some form or another, but the whole place has been worked over and tripwired in expectation of him. Would’ve been the death of him if he’d come here. But the details of the curse are hidden in here… the data on how to defuse it._

Lightning crashed above them, and the thunder roared, as John dismounted. A narrow switchback road wound up the mountainside to the castle’s gate, but it was overlooked by many low windows in that ugly pile, and John didn’t fancy their chances of getting up there without being spotted a long way off. “Better take the short cut,” he said, throwing his steed’s reins over its head and taking hold of them under its chin. “Ready?”

A low whicker as the sagacious beast’s gaze, concerned and intent, met John’s; a nod.

“Right,” John said, looking up at the dark castle. He picked his spot, took a breath, and leaned his will into the mindscape, commanding it.

A second later the two of them came out under the one of the sheer masonry walls that faired the castle proper into the mountain it crowned. John and the horse crowded themselves against that wall, under the overhang of a terrace walk overhead. Not far away, an iron-bound door was set in the black stone. The door had an iron-ring doorhandle and a grille set in it midway.

“Right,” John murmured. “You’re out of sight here. Sit tight, huh? Won’t be long.”

Another whicker low in the horse’s throat. He glanced upward, lightning catching in his eyes: then back at John. _Best not be,_ the look said.

John simply patted his neck, and cautiously peered through the grille. Once more he bent his will against the mindscape, telling it what he needed.

And he was inside. He held still until his eyes got used to the dark. It wasn’t total: green-flickering torches were set in the walls further down a long hallway that led to stairs reaching downward. _The dungeon,_ John thought. _Perfect._

He made his way down the corridor and started down the steps, moving cautiously. There were no guards, possibly because there was some kind of Classic FM-inspired loud-music party going on upstairs. _Good,_ John thought. _Less chance they’ll hear me if I need to make some noise down here._

Though it was a fair question whether he’d even be noticed at all. The curse wasn’t expecting him to seek this place out, but Sherlock. _Never mind. Safer to assume that they’ll be on the lookout for anybody breaking in. Or out. We’ve been lucky so far, doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way…_

He made his way silently down onto the dungeon level, a long corridor full of doors barred and locked. John walked softly past door after door, listening to the cries of rage and pain that came from them. The whole place was crammed full of dark things, terrible secrets, ugly truths, data about crime and cruelty and violent death, all shut up in these grim little cells and screaming in muffled voices for release.

John had no illusions about what would happen if he opened any of those doors. He ignored them and kept looking, stopping every now and then to close his eyes and hold still and just feel, feel around him for something that wanted his attention, that was secretly signaling him in a way that wouldn’t alert the curse. The loophole would try to help you find it if it could—

But he was running out of places to look. Down at the end of the hall was what must have been the smallest cell of all, perfectly silent. John almost turned away from it. But something in the back of his mind said, _No!_

He went on down to the end of the hall and peered through the grille of the final dungeon cell. It stank of damp and mould and pissed-on straw, but inside its dimness it held just one thing: a sword in an anvil that sat on a stone.

John rolled his eyes even as his heart leapt. _Walt,_ he thought, _you’ve got a whole lot to answer for…_

The key stood in the door. John turned it, eased the door open, praying it wouldn’t creak too loudly. The hinges started emitting a low groan, and John paused, took the key out of the lock, pocketed it, and slipped in sideways through the gap.

The sword wasn’t the one from that other movie, that was certain. Instead of a golden hilt and pommel, this one’s hilt was ebony wound about with steel wire oxidised dark. The polished round stone at the end might have been onyx; and written on the blade just under the hilt were not words, but an equation John didn’t understand at first glance. _dU=…what is that, another d? Greek maybe? δQ + δW—_

 _Oh, never mind!_ It was one of those broadswords you could use with one hand or two. John wrapped his hands around the long hilt and pulled—

And staggered backwards as the sword slipped readily free of the anvil and his mind flooded with visions and emotions. In a flash, more than an hour’s worth of imagery and feeling taking less than a second to pass in-mind, John started seeing what he needed to see through Sherlock’s eyes.

He was in the dimness of some cinema in the London area, a long time ago, when Sherlock as a young boy was taken to see a film as a weekend treat—a special release of a film not often seen on the big screen any more. John had a guess or two about what kind of young boy Sherlock had been: he could catch faintly-echoing references in the background of the mindscape to someone called Carl Powers—just a teen himself—and to the “genius sprog” (as the _Daily Mail_ had had it) who’d solved his murder. But now John was party to the ruckus that ensued when the Genius Sprog was dragged off to sit through a _fairy tale,_ no matter how classic or beautiful it was supposed to be.

John could hear first-hand the blistering scorn Sherlock heaped on the adults who’d sprung this vile trap on him, and he could feel the impact in his bones as the furious child flung himself down into a plush-covered theatre seat and began what was meant to be an epic sulk. Yet at the same time John could feel the boy’s interest spark reluctantly into life when he realised that the music behind the titles was Tchaikovsky—however simplistically restated. Then came the slightly less reluctant interest as the splendidly vivid and stylised art began to splash itself across the screen, clean-lined and jewel-like and plainly influenced by the medieval art of the _Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry._

Once the art and the music had hold of the nine-year-old Sherlock, they’d wedged the door open for the storytelling… and the result was something of a foregone conclusion. The world’s only consulting detective was still at too early a stage in his career to be able to _completely_ resist such an assault, especially in seventy millimeter and Dolby stereo. Also, the boy who’d secretly wanted to be a pirate (and did Disney have anything to do with _that_ , John now wondered) at that point still had a romantic streak a yard wide. Though in later life he’d violently repress it, though Sherlock’s daily, well-trodden ground of being had over the years been purposefully denuded of romance in its conventional, boy-meets-girl-or-(fine-it’s-all-fine) sense, this served only to confirm a vital fact: _something_ about this story had sunk in deep.

John—reading Sherlock’s reactions, as it were, over the shoulder of his young mind—could tell that the important element definitely was _not_ the princess, who to Sherlock’s way of thinking spent entirely too much time serenading the wildlife and doing as she was told. It _absolutely_ wasn’t the fairies, who in dully-predictable triplicate allowed their sentiment to betray them at the last moment and royally (so to speak) cock things up. A better candidate would have been the prince, who though his papa was apparently a blithering idiot, was far more willing to buck the _status quo,_ was bold and decisive, and very good with a sword. It could even have been the horse, who was funny and smart and loyal and extremely brave, if short on sophisticated (or even comprehensible) dialogue. And certainly the dark sorceress, who might be the villain but knew her own mind, had a very superior line in snark, and could also turn into a dragon, which was enviable to say the least—

John’s head came up as he heard something new. From down the hall the sound of the screaming coming from the locked and barred data rooms had been more or less a constant. But now he heard something that sounded like a bird cawing, and other noises, clanking and clunking and heavy footsteps on the stairs—

 _Rumbled!_ John thought. As he turned he saw something leaning against the wall: a shield. _Useful._ He snatched it up, noted the single-snake RAMC caduceus emblazoned on it, grinned in grim approval and slung it by its strap over his back. Then he slid out the door again. _Dammit, they’re coming, nowhere to go but through—_

And no more than a second later, here was the first wave of black-armoured cartoon minions coming at him. Fortunately in the movie they were supernally stupid—having spent sixteen years searching for a baby, not the young woman she’d grown into. And to a man, or monster, they were all shorter than he was. _Pleasant change,_ John thought: for some reason all the most memorable fights from his Army days had involved people who’d had either significant height or weight on him.

John was no swordsman, but the sword was so light in his hand that it almost seemed to have ideas of its own, and it was truly terrifyingly sharp. When John swung it at the first orcish-looking baddie it simply bisected him. John chopped his way through his attackers with no qualms whatsoever, almost with the delight of killing baddies in a good video game. The bird—some kind of crow, _or no, wait, a magpie,_ even in this dimness he caught the flash of white in the wings and tail—flapped about John’s head a moment, shrieking, beak and claws striking at his eyes. John swept the sword at it, almost got lucky: sheared off the ends of the tailfeathers. The thing fled, squawking.

John raced up the stairs before any more guards should come down them: ran for the door in the wall, slammed up against it: willed himself through onto the other side.

His trusty steed was there, stamping all its feet with impatience and alarm. John found the stirrup, swung up into the saddle, grabbed the reins, gasping, and said “Shortcut!”

The horse threw his head up and neighed as John leaned his will against the mindscape again. Lightning was flashing around them as the infuriated owner of the castle realised what had happened. Then things went dark, and a second later the lightning was far away and John and his mount were in the green space under the fairytale castle. The steed neighed again, reared, leapt forward and made up the rising ground for the gate.

John knew perfectly well what was going to happen next. Ahead of them, the thorns that had been shadows of themselves before were going to be coming real, growing higher, twining upwards and lacing their trunks into impenetrability. It was unavoidable, part of the story that Sherlock had accepted all those years ago, the day he’d bought into something more important than any of the characters in the movie. In briefly shared memory John watched a nine year old consultant-detective-to-be in the suddenly magical darkness of a cinema matinee—his sulk, his body, for the moment nearly his whole world forgotten—as he fell in love not only with adventure, all over again, but with the prospect of courting danger and boldly conquering it in the great battle of life against death.

And the earlier fascination with piracy just couldn’t compete. The freedom to do what you pleased, to take what you wanted, to tweak Authority’s tail and make people you disliked walk the plank… of course that was heady. But in _this_ milieu, one could look about and say “Here be dragons!”— with the satisfaction of knowing that here too was a place for people whose job it was to slay them, people who’d be praised and honoured afterwards for their courage and cleverness. Princesses weren’t the issue. _Winning_ was the issue. And… all right, admit it… doing good was all right too—

The blare of a horn pulled John out of mindscape for a moment. He stared down at the netbook in his lap. The cab they were following had turned about a mile ahead. “Hey, got it, up at the next roundabout they went left!”

“A235?”

“Yeah, toward Thornton Heath.”

“Right!”

John tried to swallow, failed, his mouth going dry. _Sherlock._ He was still reasoning hard up ahead: John could catch the glint of traffic sliding past through the haze of Sherlock's fierce concentration. But John’s thoughts were as much with that little boy in the long-ago cinema. After what happened to him there, John suspected Sherlock had denounced the whole trip as stupid and childish and pointless and irrational. Too late, though. It had him.

 _And somebody_ saw _it get him._ A chill went down John’s back that was more than the wind of their ride. _Or_ felt _it._

 _Someone in that cinema was Sturmed,_ John thought, and his sudden utter certainty about this simply throbbed in his bones. _Somebody felt that life-choice happen._ In fact, nobody Sturmed could possibly have missed it. _The sheer intensity— it’d have been like a_ bomb _going off._ And someone who John was sure hated Sherlock very, _very_ much had now come out of Sherlock’s past, out of the shadows of his first case, and had found their way into the depths of his mind through that opening, and had laid this curse upon him—

He closed his eyes. _Oh God, Sherlock, anything can happen here, for fuck’s sake_ be careful—!

***

And John was riding again, riding hard, sword in hand and shield on back and his steed stretched at full gallop beneath him; while overhead clouds gathered and swirled and lightning struck down into the ground nearby the palace, and the thorns reared themselves fully into physical reality. It was fabulous, and terrifying, and John’s heart was pounding… while at the same time he wanted to laugh. As little a time as he’d known Sherlock, he would never really have expected his mindscape to feature something like _this._

 _But it’s a classic, isn’t it? Lots of people incorporate fairy tales into their life scripts._ And despite this one’s modernist trappings, the underlying archetype was very very old, which accounted for its great power. Inside the protecting walls and the forest of thorns, everything would lie dormant and inaccessible; while in the midst of it all was the tower where the longing one is held safe and virginal, awaiting the intended, the fated soulmate.

 _Popular culture,_ he heard Sherlock snarl. This was where the scorn came from: the knowledge of inner weaknesses like this, incorporated long ago and impossible to control. John had caught flickering references in the distance of this mindscape to something called “deletion”. But he suspected Sherlock had found that some deletions were impossible. The original stimuli had burned too deep into the psychostrate, so that echoes of them would always be there, like print-through on an old fashioned cassette tape.

 _And consider how he is now,_ John thought as the horse leapt a fallen tree and kept going. The thorny personality, the self-erected walls of solitude, the long silences of the self stretched out in seeming immobility (though at all times occupying itself unseen) while endlessly waiting for the one whom the mitigated curse said would come. _There’s always a loophole,_ John thought. And this was Sherlock’s. The curse required someone who cared about him, someone who gave a damn about this difficult, unlovable man, to intervene. _And whoever laid this curse thought that was impossible. Now it’s just a matter of how best to exploit the fact—_

***

A sudden sense of things changing. A different view. Two buildings, mirrors of one another. The sound of a parking brake being set: the quiet that came with an engine turning off. A cab door opening—

***

They were almost up against the outer edge of the forest of thorns now. John yanked back on the reins: the horse under him neighed in shrill annoyance, fell a little backwards onto its hindquarters, then sprang at the wall of thorns again. John started chopping at them. The sword’s eager sharpness dealt with them as enthusiastically as it had with the dark castle’s minions, and a path stated to clear. The steed surged forward, neighing again as it slid through the end of the first barrier of thorns, down onto the bridge that led to the castle’s drawbridge.

John knew what was coming next, and hurriedly unslung the shield, sliding it onto his right arm: the straps went the long way rather than the short way, which was a bit of a surprise but made more sense when you actually had it on your arm: it made the shield far more mobile and more useful for defense. _Got maybe a minute before she gets here,_ John thought. _Maleficent._ He had to laugh: it was a good enough description of both the character and whoever was behind this curse. _Get out onto the bridge, get ready, we’re going to need some elbow room…_

***

The cab’s turn into the roundabout brought John’s eyes open again, but on something besides the inside of his cab. Sherlock, still in his cab.

 _And not just any cabbie, either,_ John thought, feeling the other’s affect, now quite clearly to be sensed, through Sherlock. _Shit, the bloke's_ Sturmed, _God knows why! Might even have been for treatment of some dissociative disorder._

…Or for some other, darker purpose. Of course there were people who took the procedure specifically for the power they thought it could give them over others. Not that there weren’t theoretically protections in place to keep that from happening. But the protections didn’t always work. _Oversight fails,_ John’s psychosurgical supervisor had told him; _happens all the time._ When one found evidence of that, one was required to report it to the regulator, exactly as an inspecting medical professional was required to report evidence of child abuse. But after that, follow-up too often failed. There were never enough resources, never enough time to follow up every lead; John had heard all the excuses.

But it was also possible that someone had been protecting the cabbie from notice. And to some extent he was protecting himself, too. _Because I was right, what I felt in Northumberland Street was_ right _, I_ wasn’t _confused. This guy’s smart enough, powerful enough, to overlay a fake affect on top of the real one, and the fake slipped, or wasn’t complete. So that when we caught up with him he had it in place—_

John scowled in anger that he hadn’t been able to take the guy on right then. _Because I was right. I was_ right! His certainty, in abeyance for so long, was settling itself in again, and the rush of angry delight that came with the realisation was even headier than what had come with the discovery that he had a leg that didn’t hurt him when he moved.

 _Good thing, because now I’ve got a dragon to slay._ He closed his eyes—

Pain stabbed his forehead. John winced, rubbed at it. It was hard, so hard to keep a foothold in both realscape and mindscape, and not just for one, but for _two._ John felt like he was being torn apart. _But I can do this. I_ can. _I_ have _to!_

And he was riding, riding hard, thorns occasionally tearing at him as he hacked his way toward the castle’s drawbridge. But he was also in the cab, the two visions fighting with each other now. And a third: Sherlock looking out at those two buildings. And the killer-cabbie’s innocuous, cold eyes staring into his…

John gritted his teeth. “Roland-Kerr Further Education College,” he said to his own cab driver.

“Okay. Five minutes, maybe ten if we don’t get the lights. Your friend doing a night course?”

“Not the usual kind,” John said. But the trace had definitely stopped, the little dot pinging gently, not moving any more. _Why there,_ Sherlock, _what the fuck are you doing there?_

Green, everything was strangely tinted in green. _It’s open,_ said a voice. _Cleaners are in. That’s one thing about being a cabbie. You always know a nice quiet spot for a murder—_

John swore under his breath. _Sherlock, listen to me, this fucker’s inside your head and he’s getting at you! Don’t believe anything he’s saying to you! Remember, he talked to them and they_ died, _Sherlock, oh God_ don’t listen to him—

But the curse was now operating at full power, triggered by the text from the cabbie—the words COME WITH ME burning strangely green in Sherlock’s memory as he’d looked at them on the screen of the phone. The cabbie’s words were blocking everything out, and it was John that Sherlock wasn’t listening to. And now there was a gun in Sherlock’s face.

“Oh, _dull,”_ he heard Sherlock say. But that green light was clinging about everything, it seemed, and behind the cabbie a tangle of it danced like a will o’ the wisp, leading Sherlock fascinated up the stairs. At the top of them was a prosaic lab-class sort of room full of long tables; at the far end of the room, windows full of darkness. And across from Sherlock, sitting down at one of the tables, gesturing Sherlock to sit with him, a little beige-grey cabbie in a flat cap. Sherlock sank into the chair opposite, staring at two vials, each containing a pill…

_Touch it. Touch it, I say—_

The lure of danger and mystery were thick in the air, themselves an ensorcelment of their own for this man, never something he could resist. Not to mention his utter certainty of his own cleverness, the idea that both physically and mentally he was a match for anything that might come up against him—

 _No!_ John was calling to him from inside, _don’t assume anything, don’t touch those, Sherlock, for God’s sake don’t tempt fate—_

But tempting fate was what this man was all about. There he sat staring at the pills while he deduced the cabbie’s circumstances and weaknesses, and his brain roiled with percentages and possibilities, working out the chances, looking for ways to do better than fifty-fifty, to turn the odds in his favour. _There’s no way to do that, Sherlock, the deck is stacked, don’t play the game!_ But Sherlock couldn’t see what John could see. The workings of that magnificent mind were dulled by the curse, everything shrouded in a mist of bilious green, the curse hiding itself and also hiding from Sherlock’s own assessment the truth of what it was doing to him.

John’s cab pulled up in front of the two college buildings. _Oh God, which one's he in?_ There was no way to tell. And from somewhere else came a roaring as of fire shooting across the sky and crashing to earth in front of John—

He ran into one of the buildings, made his way to the topmost floor and started methodically clearing it, room by room. But elsewhere he wasn’t running, but riding—riding till his way was blocked by sudden conflagration, and his steed reared, startled by the green fire dancing before them. From it a dark form reared up in evil majesty and flung her arms wide. “Now shall you deal with _me,_ O Prince, and all the powers of Hell!” And a blazing green mushroom cloud burst up toward the clouds lowering above—

 _There's a good bottle and a bad bottle,_ said another voice of evil, far away. _...Whatever bottle you choose, I take the pill from the other one. And then, together, we take our medicine._

 _No,_ John thought as the blaze in front of him started to solidify into form. _It won’t happen, it_ can’t _happen!_

But it could. The fear rose to choke him, welled up cold in John as the cold had welled up in him after the bullet hit him, after he knew he had to get out of Dave’s mind or risk killing them both. _The same risk now. Another life endangered, all John’s fault, get out now, save himself if not Sherlock—_

Immediately he knew the sound of his own mind being turned traitor. The curse was trying to turn on him as the weaker of their two links—paradoxically because he knew more of what was going on than Sherlock did. _No,_ John thought. _Second intention or nothing. Both of us, or nothing._

In the college building, John ran down the corridors, panting with terror as he went hunting for the right window, the right door, and kept not finding it. And all the time he could hear Sherlock talking to the cabbie, playing the game out through its final moves. _It’s not chance. It’s chess. A game of chess._ And so Sherlock saw it too… which fell in perfectly with the operation of the curse. When a gun was produced, as it had been in the cab earlier, Sherlock was ready for it, having seen the muzzle and known the aperture to be the wrong calibre for the gun in question. _I know a gun when I see one..._ And John looked at the gun through Sherlock’s eyes and felt his amused scorn from inside. But that green tinge still lay over everything going on inside Sherlock’s mind, obvious to John if not to him. The curse was lying low and quiet at the moment, but it was the quiet of the predator waiting to spring. It would rise up and blind Sherlock at the worst possible moment. And that moment was coming—

John ran, pushed door after door open as Sherlock stood up and started to leave, and was stopped in the doorway by a challenge to his pride. And in John’s mindscape, the curse now reared up before him in its most potent shape, ebony-scaled, winged and spined, jaws alive with sickly green fire, enticing him to invest all his attention in it and deal with the symbol rather than the reality. _No,_ John thought. _Both or nothing. And I can do this._ Because _Any good?_ came Sherlock’s voice, echoing through his mindspace, and _Very good,_ said John. _And it’s true!_

He kicked his steed in the sides and together they charged at the dragon. John flung the shield up to deflect the flames, striking at the snapping, furious head. They were driven back, though, into the thorns and past them: and shortly the thorn-forest was aflame. The long neck came snaking in after them, and again the horse charged and John struck at the dragon’s head and drove it back a little….

The endless hallway, another door, another window. _Wait!_ Light on the far side of the room. John plunged through the doors, saw the lighted windows in the other building, saw the killer cabbie standing there with a pill in his fingers: saw Sherlock holding another. _Oh God, no, he’s touched it. Now the curse is going to execute and there’s nothing I can do to stop it._ Out of reach, out of range—

 _And maybe not._ He reached around behind him, pulled out the Sig. But now there was a complication that John hadn’t been confronted with since the battlefield in Afghanistan. _We’re in-mindscape together. If you don’t hit the cabbie, Sherlock dies. If you miss and hit Sherlock, then not only does he die, but probably you die too, trapped inside his mind._

John gulped. It was the old fear, welling up dark and cold. _Punishment for Dave Murray,_ whispered something chill and dark. _For all the ones you weren’t strong enough or smart enough to save. Fitting punishment._

But it was just the curse speaking his fear, gnawing away at John again. He swore and kept on slashing at the dragon-head snapping at him, reflecting that this curse really had an unusually powerful instinct for self-preservation. _But so do I,_ John thought. _After all, I invaded Afghanistan!_

Sherlock and the cabbie were standing with pills in their fingers, about to move. John had only a second or so to juggle his options.

_The curse first. Give him a fighting chance!_

***

John backed up on the cliff until there was nowhere left to back up to. A gout of flame blew the shield out of his hands. He took the sword right-handed, felt for the balance of it. The words that went with what he had to do, John found he could remember without Sherlock to help him: he’d whispered them too, when he was small. — _Now, sword of Truth, fly swift and sure / that evil die and good endure!_

John gulped. _Where_ is _a dragon’s heart, anyway? What’s the anatomy? Best guess—_

He leaned back, breathed a prayer, threw.

The sword spun a full turn in midflight, arrowed in toward its target and struck itself half its length deep into the dragon’s breast.

With a shriek of utter despairing rage, the dragon came crashing down toward him. John desperately sidestepped on the crumbling cliff—

***

—into a more physical reality where Sherlock was still standing, holding that deadly little thing up to the light, then bringing it down again, hesitating. Then his hand moved—

Toward his lips. John brought the gun up to the open window. No problem with the anatomy _here._ Held his breath. Aimed. _Fired—_

The cabbie dropped to the floor. John saw Sherlock stagger backwards in shock and surprise, still on his feet. Still on his feet and moving in a room with a dead body. _Broken! I broke it, the curse is broken!_

Gasping with relief, John fled before Sherlock or anyone else whose attention might have been drawn by the sound of the shot would have a chance to see what had happened. In the place where their mindscapes still overlapped he could feel desperately curious eyes searching the window of the room across the gap between the buildings to work out what had happened. For his own part, John just ran. But he ran with a grin of triumph, and no concern at all about who else might possibly be feeling it.

***

His next moves were dictated by simple prudence. John hastily took himself offsite into the darkness behind the college, and paused long enough to use the netbook again. Google Maps showed him a pub just half a block down the road: John checked his watch. _If I hurry I can get in there just before they call last orders…_ Ten minutes later John was ducking his way through the crowd at the bar, “looking for a friend”, after which he slipped into the gents’ to take a much-needed leak and get rid of any possible powder burns. While he was using the hand dryer, over its whine he heard the first sirens coming. He slipped out of the pub through the back entrance into its deserted beer garden—all the smokers having come inside to get their last drinks orders in—went over a low wall and down an alley that led into a side street, then made his way back into the street that led to the college and drifted up to the newly-strung incident tape to wait.

Sherlock was sitting on the step of an ambulance with a shock blanket draped around his shoulders, talking to Lestrade. He got up, stepped away, still talking, turned, saw John, stopped talking…

…and his eyes rolled up and he dropped to the ground.

John sighed, noting in passing that the heavy-bolt-of-silk sound description worked even on concrete.

A moment later Lestrade, staring around him in confusion and annoyance, spotted John and went to him and pulled up the incident tape for him. “He was just fine a moment ago,” Lestrade said. “Talking twenty to the dozen as usual… then down he goes. This still to do with the curse?”

John was down beside Sherlock a second later, next to one of the paramedics, checking his pulse. Instantly on his touch there was that welcome thrum of resonance, there was the humming of Sherlock’s undermind ticking over as usual: but in the mindscape, the lights were off except for a faint glow out toward the horizon.

John blinked, looking up. “Yeah. But he’s fine,” he said to Lestrade. “Post-maledictory crash. He’s got some stress energy to discharge yet: not unusual with curses. I’ll get him home, let him get some sleep… he’ll be fine in the morning.”

“Need a ride?” Lestrade said.

John thought about that, nodded. “Wouldn’t say no. Ta very much!”

They got Sherlock into a nearby police car without too much trouble. Once helped to his feet again he moved with closed eyes, like someone drunk or asleep on their feet, and John noted (with mild annoyance) some smartphone video capture going on from among the other parked police vehicles—probably not surprising, considering how rarely Sherlock looked anything but graceful. “People do mistake it for a presence seizure or some kind of fugue state,” he said to Lestrade as they got Sherlock belted into the back seat, “you’d be surprised…” It was as much of an explanation as he planned to give: no way he was going to get into details about the one thing remaining that needed to happen to complete Sherlock’s release.

Lestrade shook his head. “Learn something new every day,” he said, and shut the car door. “Look, when he wakes up tell him we need him tomorrow, right? Statements and so forth.”

“I’ll tell him. Good night.”

***

Despite the normal on-road madness that accompanied chucking-out time in London, the traffic going back wasn’t too bad. Half an hour or so later they were standing on the doorstep of 221B Baker Street, and John fished the keys out of Sherlock’s coat pocket and got them up the stairs without more noise than necessary, unsure whether Mrs. Hudson had ever actually had recourse to her herbal soothers this evening.

He got Sherlock over to the couch and stretched him out there, leaving him in his coat for the moment—though he’d been in the inmost recesses of Sherlock’s mind, something in John’s mind nevertheless balked at undressing him. He leaned Sherlock’s shoulders a little up against the couch’s arm-cushion, tucked a pillow under his head, folded Sherlock’s arms on his chest—remembering, with a smile, the earlier carved-knight pose—and then went to sit in the left-hand chair by the fire.

Sighing, John leaned his head back. _God, what a day. And what a night._

_Wouldn’t mind a cuppa…_

But there was something else to do first. John closed his eyes, slipped into his mindspace, and went to take care of one last thing.

***

In an echoing clatter of hooves John trotted under the fairytale castle's portcullis arch and came to a halt in the castle’s courtyard, all littered with sleeping bodies: a soft blue-violet tinge hung over everything, softening the prospect. _The battlefield,_ he thought, _at rest…_

But not for much longer. He swung down off his noble steed and patted his neck. “Go on,” John said. “And hey… everything you did here? It was amazing.”

The horse tilted his head a bit to give John a gentle sidelong look out of one eye, self-satisfied but also amused, as if to say _Do you know you do that out loud?_ Then he turned and ambled off toward what John assumed were the castle’s stables, picking his way casually among the sleepers. It was only as the horse was about to stroll under an archway that John noticed he’d somehow divested himself of his saddle and bridle, and it looked as if he had something long and twilight-blue draped around his neck just in front of his withers.

John watched the horse pass into shadow and vanish. _Some of the symbologies here,_ he thought, _really do_ not _bear close examination…_ He grinned to himself, shook his head, turned away.

Now it was just a matter of finding which tower. _Topmost,_ John thought after a moment. _‘Topmost tower”’ is usually the phrase._ Then he chuckled at the mental image and its implications. _Could it get much_ more _phallic? Seriously. …Never mind, how do I get up there?_

Fortunately international-Gothic castles weren’t long on interior complexity, and it took John only a few tries to find the right access corridor. _Chance?_ John thought. But chance didn’t normally have much role in the human mindscape, which above all things craved the order and rationality that the world normally failed to supply. _Or possibly someone wants to be found… but not instantly. Classic approach-avoidance? Or just him wanting to watch me reason it out?_ Though the sadder thought did intrude: _Or else he just wants to make this last. Structure hunger…_ Because people did cling to their old troubles, being afraid of letting them go and finding themselves saddled with new ones they didn’t understand so well.

But there was no point in hunting theories at this point: the reality would present itself soon enough.

John headed down along that long, long corridor, past endless rooms packed full of data, all incomprehensibly labeled. _Not my business,_ he thought, though once or twice he paused, intrigued by one label or another. _“Aluminium crutch"? “Giant Rat of Sumatra?”_ And in front of the one that said WATSON, JOHN H[?], he had to stop.

His hand was actually reacting out to the doorhandle before John caught himself. _No. Absolutely not._ In fairy tale castles it could be perilous to open any door before you were triply sure you’d been given permission.

He turned and went on down to the end of the corridor, starting to climb the tower's stair. _But still. ‘Not a palace the way Buckingham Palace is a palace…’ No, definitely not._

John spent some minutes climbing the spiral stair of the tower and finally came up through the floor of the highest room. It was hung with richly figured tapestries and had beautiful pointed Gothic-arched windows on four sides. And beside the biggest of those windows, laid out there on a narrow high bed, was a handsome dark-haired man, sound asleep.

John quietly stepped up onto the dais and for a moment very purposefully did not look at the straight slender form slumbering there, but instead gazed out through the window. It looked down, not on the fairytale castle’s surrounding parklands, but on London. This wasn’t as he’d seen it before inside Sherlock, held within a ringfence of symbols and data. This London was far greater: looking out across it, John half fancied he could see the curvature of the Earth. Down below them it glittered like all a world’s prizes heaped together, a dragon’s-hoard of light, but also of shadow: the dark places that Sherlock couldn’t resist, had to investigate. _The darkness in men’s minds,_ John thought, _and their hearts._

_And as for his own…_

John breathed out, looking at the still, pale face, all its fierceness having abandoned it for the moment, the long lashes gentle against the high cheekbones and the fine curves of the mouth gone quiet. There had, John knew, been a lesser epiphany associated with Sherlock’s life-decision long ago in that London cinema. _Or maybe not so much lesser,_ John thought. _Maybe in some ways it includes the other one._ Very quietly—for adventure and danger and the Greatest Game tend to evoke fairly noisy oaths of allegiance from their proponents—Sherlock had also given his heart to something else, of which he’d seen a hint in the film. This was the idea that if Sherlock worked hard to be clever and acted boldly to do right, if he was good enough for long enough, then someday he would find someone, or be found by them… and thereafter, by that person’s presence, life would be made right, and kept right.

And now here was Sherlock, awaiting this one last action that would free him from any aftereffects of the curse forever. _You know how this goes. So does he, inside, or he wouldn’t be here, like this, waiting…_

John sat down on the bed and simply looked down at Sherlock for a moment, and had to smile to himself. The man lay there still and composed as a tomb-effigy of a knight, not a hair out of place: and for all the faux-medieval splendor around him, here he was still in the damned coat. One concession alone his mind had made to the fairytale surroundings. With his big hands curled sternum-high one above the other around its long ebony-and-onyx hilt, the sword of his intellect lay down his body from chest to knees, naked, that glinting, dangerous razor-edged blade the only bright thing about him.

John could have sat there for quite a while just taking in and analyzing the appearance of the man who lay here, the manifold symbolisms in the room around him and in that yearning violet dawn eternally unbreaking out at the edge of things, where a shadowy morning-twilit Thames ran out past the city lights toward the sea. _And that’d just be more avoidance,_ he thought, _so cut it out._

Carefully John reached out to tease the swordhilt out of the grip of those long fingers, setting the sword aside between the sleeping form and the window; then gently guided Sherlock’s arms down by his sides. The Belstaff was drawn closed but not buttoned; John laid the front of the coat open to either side. Against the dark sheen of the heavy black silk lining, the deep violet of the shirt Sherlock wore burned warm even in shadow as John reached up to check the carotid pulse.

It was strong, as he’d expected. “All the same, you really need to eat more,” John said under his breath, shaking his head. “You can _not_ run this machinery on fumes…” Yet he wasn’t being listened to, and suspected that even if Sherlock was conscious the result would be the same. The transport was always going to be secondary for him, John suspected. Though with someone to ride shotgun for him, nag him about meals and sleep and so forth, it might not be so bad.

_And then? What if some day he turns to you and expects you to be the one who keeps him right? What then?_

John sighed. It wasn’t today’s question to answer. The one that needed answering, meanwhile, was clear, as was the way to answer it.

“Come on, you dozy git,” John murmured. “Rise and shine.”

He leaned down to Sherlock’s lips, still hesitating for one last moment, feeling the sleeper’s breath, warm and soft, against his own. It was, after all, an irrevocable statement of intent. And it could be misunderstood in a hundred ways—a thought that made him feel a little cold and forlorn inside, because being misunderstood by this amazing man would feel like failing him: would hurt. _Are you sure?_

_You’ve come a long way to not be sure._

Yet: _…Could be dangerous,_ John's memory said to him.

He closed his eyes and leaned down that last bit, tilting his head a little sideways, and pressed his lips gently to that beautiful mouth.

A bit cool, at first. Then warmer. John lifted his head away, almost reluctant, and looked up just in time to see those eyes drift open, focus, meet his; and the silver of Sherlock’s eyes, in this light, was the silver of the long slim blade.

Just the slightest curve of smile, dry and amused, manifested itself. “John,” Sherlock murmured.

“Yeah,” John said. And then he had to stop, because somehow the last thing he’d expected was for his face to be taken between those long, strong hands and pulled down again, with the air of someone who had unfinished business, or an experiment to complete.

“You are so _interesting,”_ Sherlock whispered in his ear a few moments later.

It wasn’t what he was expecting to hear. But increasingly John got the sense that nothing he heard from this man was ever going to be the expected. “Uh, thanks.”

And the next moment Sherlock was leaping up off that bed as he’d leap up off the couch at home, brushing himself down and putting himself to rights. “Well. Now that _that’s_ over with…”

John was tempted to sigh. So much for this brief venture into archetype: Sherlock was ready to plunge back into reality with both feet and put all this behind him. This kind of life of the mind wasn’t ever going to be a place he’d want to linger…

Except that suddenly he was right there in front of John again, looming a bit, his gaze resting on John with an odd speculative look: almost hesitant. “John.”

John swallowed. “Yes, what?”

“Do you dance?”

“I, uh—wait, what?”

“John, _do_ try to keep up. Do you _dance?_ The waltz, specifically.”

“I’ve never, I mean, I haven’t—”

“Well, no time like the present, is there? Come on.”

***

Later, re-examine the experience as he might, John could never quite work out the details of what had happened. One moment they were up in that tower chamber: the next they were whirling together in stately dance across a wide palatial hall full of richly dressed people who stood and watched them with a vaguely celebratory air. _But he’s asserting himself in this space,_ John thought, _as he always has. Just… now with an eye to an audience._

And Sherlock was more than worth looking at here— _well, not that he isn’t worth looking at normally, come_ on—garbed all in some bygone century’s formal black and gold, with darkest amethyst lining the coat’s long tails. “God, just look at you…”

“Why?”

“You’ve got _epaulets.”_

“One can internalize the source material too completely, John,” Sherlock said. “Not in the mood for trunk hose and capes and slashed doublets at the moment. Evening court dress will do.” The soft voice lowered, darkened, breathed into his ear. “Anyway, if I’ve got epaulets, so do _you.”_

“Oh God,” John muttered. He had never been sure about how he looked in his service formals—whether they’d actually made him look any better, or just better at being short. The mess-dress jacket was so tight, and a bum-freezer as well, and the trousers—

“John. Don’t _think_ while you’re dancing, it ruins your rhythm. Here, you lead.”

“Wait, Sherlock, I don’t know how to—!”

“Yes you do.”

“But I’m no good at—”

“Yes you are.” —And astonishingly, John found, yes he was. _Because of being here. Because of what he is. And what he lets_ me _be._

“But you started it,” Sherlock murmured. “You let _me_ be.”

 _Here, use mine._ “…So I did,” John said, and smiled.

They circled the floor once in silence while the orchestra played, and all around them the magnificently dressed courtier-crowd of Sherlock’s thoughts stood watching them go by. At first John tried to just stop figuring it all out—especially one thing he noticed out the corner of one eye: pushed up against one tapestried wall, Jennifer Wilson's suitcase, looking very pink... and then very blue. And very pink again. At the point where it once again turned blue, John sighed and turned back to Sherlock, in tacit admission that where this man was involved, there were always going to be questions. “Why?” John said quietly, looking up into his eyes.

“What, this?" The hand resting on his hip squeezed just a bit tighter. "Closure, John. Isn’t that what every good fairy tale needs? Some kind of happy ending?”

“Not sure we’re quite there yet,” John said. “Still some loose ends. We know who put the curse in place. But not why.”

“Moriarty…” Sherlock said softly. But there was that half smile again.

John chuckled. “What are you so happy about?”

“One mystery solved, and hey presto we’ve got another!” Sherlock said. _“Perfection.”_

“Yeah, well, just enjoy the downtime a little first, okay?”

The half-smile completed itself, though it had a musing quality to it.

They waltzed on, and still as figures in a tapestry the quietly approving courtiers watched them pass. Yet one of them, because of a different kind of stillness, caught John’s eye as they waltzed past him: a figure in a suit, leaning on an umbrella. “Sherlock,” John whispered. “That’s him.”

“What? Who?”

“The man I told you about. Your arch-enemy.”

Sherlock glanced at him as they whirled and he came around into line of sight. “Oh,” he said, and raised his voice: _“Get out of my head, Mycroft!”_

The watching figure rolled his eyes. “Mycroft?” John said, completely confused.

“My brother. Mycroft.” Sherlock sighed an exaggerated sigh. “Just because he’s the British government, he thinks he can just walk into any other realm’s events without an invitation. And turning up for an occasion like this in a _business suit?”_   He turned his head again as the two of them turned. “You’re not wanted in any case,” he shouted, first in one direction and then in another as they spun, so that John got a little dizzy trying to keep an eye on his expression, “you can pretend all you like that you’re so worried about me but I know perfectly well why you’re here, so you can just get right back to edging toward the creampuffs and the eclairs!”

“Your brother,” John said. “Oh God. Don’t tell me, he’s got some obscure agenda of his own…” _And the man’s Sturmed to quite a level. If he wanted his agenda to stay obscure, he could hardly be better set up for it—_

There was a slight hiccup in their joint rhythm as they came about once more: but Sherlock’s brother was gone. “Did I not tell you to stop thinking, John?” An exasperated sigh. “Never mind, let me lead again.”

An effortless switching of positions, hand up, arm around waist, not even breaking stride. _How is this so easy? And why do I not really give a damn?_ All John could do was smile a bit and relax into it, while around them the marshalled workings of Sherlock’s mindscape looked on in silent appreciation that could be felt on one’s body as a warmth like sunlight. Somewhere off in the background, a subdued chorus had begun singing under the orchestra—

_I know you! I walked with you_  
_once upon a dream;_  
_I know you—the gleam in your_  
_eyes is so familiar a gleam!_  
_Yet I know it’s true that visions_  
_are seldom all they seem—_  
_but if I know you,_  
_I know what you’ll do…_

“Not really a dream of course,” Sherlock murmured. “Weary strained old metaphor…”

“Metaphors have their uses,” John said as they started another go-round.

Sherlock sighed the gentle put-upon sigh of a great mind graciously putting up with the foibles and follies of lesser ones. “Very well. And now what?”

“How do you mean?”

“When an old dream comes true.” _Aha,_ John thought, _so the metaphor’s not_ that _weary or strained._ “What happens now?”

There it was, the shy uncertainty: as of someone who’d never had a dream come true before. _And who’s afraid that the bright time’s over, that everyone gets just one happy ending…_ “Structure hunger” again, one of many jargon-phrases for it. But John knew the fear of approaching loneliness when he felt it, however second-hand it might be.

He sighed, and shook his head, and pulled Sherlock just a touch closer as they slowly whirled together. “Put it away safe and start dreaming a new one?” John whispered, his voice surprising him, going a bit rough. “One that’s even better?”

“Eminently sensible,” Sherlock said softly. “Let’s get to work on that, shall we?”

John nodded and let his partner draw him closer in turn. For a moment he caught sight of everything happening around him as if he were a viewer, not a participant—the two figures swirling gracefully away together, perfectly in sync, the one in black-and-scarlet mess jacket over black, the one in midnight tailcoat ornately ornamented in gold at the shoulders and waist. _Unusual point of view,_ John thought, though a bit absently, because he was also busy looking up into the strangely soft eyes that gazed down into his, their silver gone warm, indeed a little golden, in this light. _Almost as if there was a common ground of being. Or two that were merging…_

_Can that even happen, I wonder?_

_...Could be dangerous,_ remarked another voice from somewhere.

John grinned at that. _Let’s find out._

***

Soon enough, dawn came up across the landscapes of both their minds. And as London awoke with it, and the traffic out on Baker Street and the business of the waking world began, John opened his eyes to see a tall slim figure standing silhouetted in the window. As it turned toward him, John leaned his head against the back of his chair, and thought: _So this is ever after…_

“Got your breath back?” Sherlock said.

John nodded. “Ready when you are,” he said, and went to put the kettle on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [A few notes on "Second Intention"](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/84671435992/second-intention-notes-and-links) can be found at the [Lotus Room blog.](http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com)


End file.
